{"id":3644,"date":"2018-09-26T12:58:40","date_gmt":"2018-09-26T11:58:40","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.linuxmint.com\/?p=3644"},"modified":"2018-09-28T17:31:29","modified_gmt":"2018-09-28T16:31:29","slug":"monthly-news-september-2018","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.linuxmint.com\/?p=3644","title":{"rendered":"Monthly News – September 2018"},"content":{"rendered":"

Many thanks to all the people who donate to us. Numbers were lower than normal last month but we’re still getting a tremendous amount of support. We’re at an average of $10,000 per month. Although that average decreased slightly over the last three years it is very high, it covers all our expenses, when we need something money is never an issue (whether it’s to scale slowly, invest in security, hosting, CI services or to tackle an emergency) and it allows us to send money upstream when needed and to donate funds internally within our moderation and development teams. We’re able to facilitate development and boost our productivity by making tools available and delegate aspects which would otherwise get in the way. It’s a real help for us, I know I say it every month but I don’t think we’ll ever be thankful enough. If you’re helping us, thank you.<\/p>\n

Now, without further ado, let’s talk about development. With Mint 19 and LMDE 3 officially released our hands are now free to develop and improve our software on top of the new bases (respectively Ubuntu 18.04 and Debian Stretch).<\/p>\n

Nemo<\/strong><\/p>\n

Nemo 4.0 is lightning fast.<\/p>\n

Michael Webster reviewed the Cinnamon file manager and optimized it in many ways. Here are some of his notes when working on it. Throughout the commits below, he asks a new instance of nemo to list the content of \/usr\/bin after dropping all caches:<\/p>\n

Nemo startup time: 3.488751 seconds
\nFolder load time: 2.644505 seconds
\nIdle…Folder load time: 2.874406 seconds<\/p>\n

Generate tooltips for icon items on-demand, instead of when the view loads:
\nNemo startup time: 2.510636 seconds
\nFolder load time: 1.596948 seconds
\nIdle…Folder load time: 1.654450 seconds<\/p>\n

Optimize icon lookups by GIcon:
\nNemo startup time: 2.011817 seconds
\nFolder load time: 1.158854 seconds
\nIdle…Folder load time: 1.226699 seconds<\/p>\n

Decrease minimum update interval:
\nNemo startup time: 1.797009 seconds
\nFolder load time: 0.937992 seconds
\nIdle…Folder load time: 0.973764 seconds<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The result is very impressive. Nemo feels extremely light and browsing directories is a breeze. It’s never been that fast before and it’s immediately noticeable.<\/p>\n

Michael also improved icon sizes and spacing to make Nemo look better.<\/p>\n

Nemo is now able to show file creation times (note that this requires ext4, a kernel 4.15 or above and it doesn’t work within an encrypted home directory).<\/p>\n

Nemo-python and all Nemo python extensions were ported to Python 3.<\/p>\n

XappStackSideBar<\/strong><\/p>\n

Joseph Mccullar, who was involved in the UI revamp of the Welcome Screen in Linux Mint 19, and lead the UI revamp of the Software Sources for the upcoming Linux Mint 19.1, created a new widget in libxapp called XappStackSideBar.<\/span><\/p>\n

This streamlines icon sidebars and makes it really easy to use them within applications. We’re able to design these sidebars from a click of the mouse in Glade, connect them to a GTK stack and design their pages really easily.
\n<\/span><\/p>\n

The existing XappPreferencesWindow now also makes use of it.<\/span><\/p>\n

Here’s how it looks for instance in Nemo 4.0:<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n

Cinnamon<\/strong><\/p>\n

The star of the month within the Cinnamon team is Jason Hicks. Last month we talked about VSYNC, input lag and performance improvements within the muffin window manager. This is now a reality and it’s all been merged in preparation for muffin 4.0.<\/p>\n

Input lag was reduced on NVIDIA cards and the window manager feels more responsive when moving windows. You now also have the possibility to turn off VSYNC in the System Settings. This basically delegates VSYNC to your GPU driver (which needs to handle it otherwise you get screen tearing) and if that driver performs well, it can eliminate input lag and boost performance.<\/p>\n

Jason also ported a huge amount of upstream changes from the GNOME project:<\/p>\n