We received donations from 730 people in December and 695 in January. I have to tell you it’s a real pleasure to see these numbers, especially after a release. Aside from helping us financially this is a huge motivational boost for everyone involved. I like to imagine 700 people in a room with smiles on their face who came just because they enjoyed what we worked on. We all contributed something in the team, whether it’s a performance improvement in Cinnamon, a new desktop utility tool, a system fix, an idea… we had fun and we made a lot of people happy, and that is a fantastic feeling. Many thanks to you all for your donations and for your support.<\/p>\n
As you know Linux Mint 20.3 is out and it was the last 20.x release. The next development cycle comes with a fair share of ideas and exciting new features, but also some really ambitious items when it comes to the foundations and the technology we’re using under the hood. For instance, we’re currently working on rebasing Cinnamon’s window manager and Javascript interpreter on more modern versions of mutter and GJS.<\/p>\n
The LMDE project continues. LMDE stands for Linux Mint Debian Edition and consists in making a distribution which is almost identical to Linux Mint but based on Debian instead of Ubuntu. It’s an interesting exercise because it forces us to test the compatibility of our own software stack with Debian and it shows us exactly why and how we rely on Ubuntu and where we find ourselves without it. Ubuntu, as a package base, but also as a set of improvements, additional packages and bug fixes on top of Debian, is a major component of Linux Mint. Although LMDE shows us why Ubuntu is the best alternative for us it also shows us how easy it is to port our work to a different base and how close to Linux Mint that gets us. We work on LMDE primarily for us, to get that information. It is not a priority, certainly not compared to Linux Mint itself, but it is an important project nonetheless.<\/p>\n
Work on LMDE 5 started early in January. LMDE 4 was already on par with the Mint, Xapp and Cinnamon stacks featured in 20.2. The patches we apply to Ubuntu were ported over and the stacks were upgraded to what was published in 20.3. The result is a little bit underwhelming because it just looks and feels like Linux Mint 20.3. Under the surface though it features a Debian 11 base which software is more recent than Ubuntu 20.04 and which gives us a preview of some of the challenges we’ll face in Linux Mint 21. It helps us prepare for that next version.<\/p>\n
In terms of release we’re close to BETA. All the backports and packages are ready. The LMDE 5 ISO image boots and installs fine. There are no critical issues on the horizon.<\/p>\n
We identified a small list of bugs we want to get fixed before it reaches QA. We might postpone a little bit potentially to add more features to the installer, to look at the upgrade mechanism and the GNOME screenshot utility (which regressed significantly upstream between 3.36 and 3.38). Other than that things look pretty good, we’ll definitely have a BETA this month.<\/p>\n Sponsorships:<\/strong><\/p>\n Linux Mint is proudly sponsored by:<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blog.linuxmint.com\/upload\/2022\/02\/lmde.png\")
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