Monthly News – November 2014

News:

The release of the Cinnamon and MATE editions of Linux Mint 17.1 “Rebecca” were very well received. We were excited to unveil what we had worked on since the previous release and continuing to work on the same package base was a breeze. It was fun also to see people upgrade to 17.1 with ease, that went really well as well. We’re getting close to the end of the year though so I hope we’ll get the opportunity to talk about 17.1 and design topics again, but for now I’d like to touch a few words on the Xfce and KDE editions. We’re expecting their release candidates to be available next week. Only minor bugs remain and we’re confident they’ll pass QA very easily. KDE was upgraded to 4.14 and MDM received support for KDE Wallet (the wallet is now created and opened in the background, so no user interaction is necessary). Xfce was given out-of-the-box support for Compiz (just like in the MATE edition), Xfburn received Blu-ray support, the Whisker menu was upgraded and the default configuration was refined. The stable release for these two editions was estimated for the end of December but the RCs are a few days late, Christmas and the New Year will certainly eat a few days and there are items in the roadmap which were postponed but might come back into 17.1 as the dev. team is still looking into them (in particular we’re not happy with the look and feel of xscreensaver and with the fact that unlocking the session doesn’t unlock the screensaver in KDE and Xfce). It’s too hard to say just yet whether the stable ISOs will be out this year or the next.
The decision was made to use GTK 3.14 in LMDE 2 “Betsy” (the same version as in Debian Jessie). Themes and parts of Cinnamon will be adapted to work properly with it. The decision to switch to systemd or to continue to use sysvinit was not taken yet.
A few bugs were fixed and will be pushed towards the repositories. In particular two of them prevent the Cinnamon “System Settings” from opening (the first one when a theme thumbnail is unreadable, the second when gir1.2-notify-0.7 is not installed). Expect a package update in the coming days.
351 people donated to us in November. Add to that all the feedback we got, the help we received and your many words, emails, comments of encouragement. It’s a real pleasure to be working for you. Not only does your support make everything easy for us, along with your feedback and just after a release like this one, it feels really good to do what we do. In memory of Husse and the people who shaped this community from the early days into what it is now, it’s a real privilege to be part of this, to make you happy and to feel your support on a daily basis. Many thanks to everybody in our community.
We’ll announce the RCs for Xfce and KDE before the holidays but release announcements are pretty formal… so I’ll take this opportunity and wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

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