{"id":3887,"date":"2020-03-31T15:39:19","date_gmt":"2020-03-31T14:39:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.linuxmint.com\/?p=3887"},"modified":"2020-03-31T15:39:19","modified_gmt":"2020-03-31T14:39:19","slug":"monthly-news-march-2020","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.linuxmint.com\/?p=3887","title":{"rendered":"Monthly News – March 2020"},"content":{"rendered":"

Many thanks to all of you for your support and for your donations. LMDE 4 took longer than we anticipated but we managed to add many new features into it and significantly close the gap with the Ubuntu release. Now that it’s released we’re focusing on the new development cycle and the upcoming Ubuntu 20.04 package base.<\/p>\n

LMDE 3 EOL<\/strong><\/p>\n

LMDE 3 will reach EOL (End-Of-Life) on July 1st 2020. Past that date the repositories will continue to work but the release will no longer receive bug fixes and security updates from Linux Mint.<\/p>\n

To upgrade LMDE 3 to LMDE 4 read “How to upgrade to LMDE 4<\/a>“.<\/p>\n

Mint 20, codename Ulyana<\/strong><\/p>\n

The codename for Linux Mint 20 is Ulyana.<\/p>\n

Linux Mint 20 will be based on Ubuntu 20.04 and feature 3 editions: Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce.<\/p>\n

Unlike previous releases, it will only be available in 64-bit.<\/p>\n

StatusNotifier, libAppIndicator and libAyatana<\/strong><\/p>\n

Following a change in Electron, XappStatusIcon applets will gain support for StatusNotifier, libAppIndicator and libAyatana.<\/p>\n

This support, which was disabled by default in Cinnamon, will be removed entirely from the DE and delegated to the XappStatusIcon applet.<\/p>\n

LibAppIndicator and libAyatana have the ability to fallback to xembed (the GTK tray technology), so in Cinnamon, even though support for these technologies was disabled by default, applications using these libraries would still get their icon into the tray. In Mint, the situation was even better because libAppIndicator was patched to fallback to XappStatusIcon before falling back to xembed, thus preserving compatibility with HiDPI and symbolic icons. The problem was with applications using StatusNotifier directly.. which just didn’t fallback to anything at all and had no visible tray icon. With Electron moving to StatusNotifier this issue became more urgent.<\/p>\n

XappStatusIcon applets gaining support for these technologies will guarantee better support for modern Electron apps and indicators and it will do so in all distributions, without the need to patch anything.<\/p>\n

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

The team looked at the performance of the file manager and changes are being made to the way Nemo is handling thumbnails. Although the generation of new thumbnails was done asynchronously, loading existing ones could sometimes have an impact on browsing content and navigating directories.<\/p>\n

The main idea behind these changes is to prioritize content and navigation and to delay thumbnails as much as possible. As a result, the content of directories shows up with generic icons before the thumbnails are rendered, but the improvement in performance is quite noticeable.<\/p>\n

This also has a positive impact on performance in cases of heavy I\/O and slow HDDS, such as when moving videos to external devices.<\/p>\n

Warpinator<\/strong><\/p>\n

The tool to send files across the local network is almost ready. We’re looking into data encryption now. It works well, it looks nice, but we still don’t have a name for it.<\/p>\n\n\n

\"\"\/<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

If anyone has a good name in mind please shout.. otherwise we might actually do call it “Warpinator” \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n

New colors<\/strong><\/p>\n

Two of the Mint-Y colors were finalized.<\/p>\n

This is the new Pink:<\/p>\n\n\n

\"\"\/<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

and this is the new Aqua:<\/p>\n\n\n

\"\"\/<\/a><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

Sponsorships:<\/strong><\/p>\n

Linux Mint is proudly sponsored by:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Platinum Sponsors:<\/span>
Gold Sponsors:
\"Linux<\/a>
Silver Sponsors:
\"Sucuri\"<\/a>
\"ThinkPenguin:<\/a>
\"Tibor<\/a>
Bronze Sponsors:
\"Vault<\/a>
\"AYKsolutions<\/a>
\"Goscomb\"<\/a>
\"BGASoft<\/a>
\"David<\/a>
\"Feathercoin\"<\/a>
\"Synapse<\/a>
\"Uwe<\/a><\/td>\n		Community Sponsors:

<\/p>\n