Many thanks for your support and your donations. You make this project thrive and it’s a real pleasure to work on it.
We’ve had to overcome a few issues and this development cycle hasn’t been the smoothest, but we’re really happy right now. We’re excited to get close to the BETA release and to show everybody what we’ve been working on. We’re proud of our achievements and some of the features and improvements which were implemented. We’re delighted to be together and to have fun within the team, working on all of this.
Nemo: Pinning items
The Cinnamon file manager features some cool new features. If you find yourself always looking for the same files over and over again… just pin them.
It’s that easy. Pinned items show up on top and are easy to reach.
Nemo: Conditional actions
When you right-click a file, you see the actions you can perform on it. Until now these actions could only be generic. Starting with Nemo 4.2, actions can implement their own external condition. In other words, actions can use scripts or external commands to target specific files in specific conditions. This will allow us to ship actions which are much smarter than before.
Let’s take an example. When you right-click a picture, you can choose the “Set as Wallpaper” action. This action targets all pictures files. No matter what file you select, if it’s a picture file, you’ll see this action.
Going forward we can have actions for specific use cases, which won’t get in the way of your daily use, but which will be there for you when you need them.
Say you right-click an .mkv which is larger than 4GB, just choose to “Split it”. Say you select a video which audio is encoded as DTS.. just right-click it and choose “Convert DTS audio to AC3”. Say the picture you’re right-clicking has geolocation in its metadata, just right-click “Show me where it was taken” to open up the map.
The sky is the limit, these are just examples. In future releases we’ll need to assess the performance costs of shipping a multitude of actions. With Nemo 4.2, we now have the technology to do it (and so do you if you want to make your own actions). Actions can predict whether they’re needed or not way better than they could ever do in the past, and that will allow us to make your right-click menu in your file manager one of the handiest tools there is.
Cinnamon menu
Cinnamon is faster and snappier than before. It uses less RAM and it loads faster. Some of these improvements come from the DocInfo and Appsys reviews, some come from the Muffin window manager, and some come from the work done on the application menu.
Beside the performance improvements the application menu now identifies and distinguishes duplicates. If two applications have the same name, the menu will show more information about them.
In your application menu, Xed is the “Text Editor”. If you install Gedit, you no longer end up with two “Text Editor” entries. Instead, you’ll see “Text Editor (Xed)” and “Text Editor (Gedit)”.
The same goes for Flatpaks, if you install the Flatpak of an application you already have, the menu will distinguish between the two to let you know which one is the one from the repositories and which one is the Flatpak.
Scrollbar settings
This is not for everybody but it’s been requested many times in the past. People who don’t like overlay scrollbars or who want to override the theme settings will be able to so graphically.
Xapps
Pix, along with the text editor, the document reader, the video player and the image viewer were reviewed and support was added to ensure users could use the traditional Ctrl+Q and Ctrl+W keyboard shortcuts.
In the document reader preferences, a zoom selector can now be added to the toolbar.
MintBox 3
We’re working with Compulab on the most powerful MintBox ever.
MintBox 3 will be based on the Airtop 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35OyZzCvG0g
I’ve been using an Airtop1 as my main computer for a while now and it’s a beautiful machine.
The specifications and prices below aren’t final:
1. Basic configuration: $1543 with a Core i5 (6 cores), 16 GB RAM, 256 GB EVO 970, Wi-Fi and FM-AT3 FACE Module.
2. High end: $2698 with Core i9, GTX 1660 Ti, 32 GB RAM, 1TB EVO 970, WiFi and FM-AT3 FACE Module.
Snap
When snap was announced it was supposed to be a solution, not a problem. It was supposed to make it possible to run newer apps on top of older libraries and to let 3rd party editors publish their software easily towards multiple distributions, just like Flatpak and AppImage. What we didn’t want it to be was for Canonical to control the distribution of software between distributions and 3rd party editors, to prevent direct distribution from editors, to make it so software worked better in Ubuntu than anywhere else and to make its store a requirement.
If you’re a Fedora user and you want to install Spotify, you’re told to go to https://snapcraft.io/spotify. Spotify doesn’t distribute RPM packages, appimage, Flatpak or anything useful to a Fedora user who wants to download it, or to a Fedora maintainer who wants to add it to a repository. Fedora users are told to go to what is essentially a commercial store operated by a RedHat competitor where stats tell them their distribution is only 7th best.
We’re in luck, we can still download the .deb. If Spotify stops caring, what do we do? We move to snap because we have to? Will the snap store continue to let people download actual .snap files in the future or will that get locked down ? Will the snap store continue to operate without an Ubuntu One account or will we get vendor-locked ? I think it’s important to appreciate these aspects.
We all have smartphones, and we all know how great the Google Play store is. How often do we see .apk (Android packages) on the web ? How hard are they to install without the Google store ? How free is an editor to publish its .apk itself while being present in the store ? Who controls all that and what does it mean for us ? Who governs what can and cannot go into the store ? Who makes commercial deals ? Who do we rely on ? And why ?
As long as snap is a solution to a problem, it’s great. Just like Flatpak, it can solve some of the real issues we have with frozen package bases. It can provide us with software we couldn’t otherwise run as packages. When it starts replacing packages for no good reason though, when it starts harming our interaction with upstream projects and software vendors and reducing our choice, it becomes a threat.
A Fedora user shouldn’t be told about Ubuntu and Ubuntu One when downloading software. His browser shouldn’t have bookmarks pointing to another distribution. His software shouldn’t be designed and tested primarily with another desktop environment and distribution in mind, and when he looks at screenshots he shouldn’t see Ubuntu everywhere. It’s wrong for Spotify to do that and it’s wrong for any vendor to think that such a store can be the only store for all Linux users. For this to work it would need to be governed by us all, with clear goals, without bias and without conflict of interest.
When Flatpak came out it immediately allowed anyone to create stores. The Flatpak client can talk to multiple stores. Spotify is on Flathub and they can push towards it. If tomorrow they have an argument with Flathub they can create their own store and the very same Flatpak client will still work with it. When Snap came out, it was only a client. The server was behind closed doors and the client couldn’t talk to multiple servers. We’ve been worried about this since then, but it was OK. As long as Snap didn’t become the de-facto standard for all editors to publish to all users of Linux, it was OK. As long as editors didn’t stop distributing packages, it was OK. As long as Snap didn’t remove what we already had, it was perfectly OK. The Ubuntu Store, which is now called the Snap Store (which makes sense since there can only be “one” store, by design), was promising because it could provide software we didn’t have access to, and a payment platform to purchase commercial software. It’s doing much more than that though, it could reduce access to free (as in beer) software and free (as in freedom) software.
There are a lot of things you can do with package managers (apt/dpkg in Linux Mint), that you can’t do with Snap, and there are two reasons for this. First, they’ve been around for a while. They’re mature, they’re integrated fully within the OS in every distributions. Second, they’ve been developed with Free Software in mind. There are no commercial aspects in the design of apt/dpkg, it’s all about empowering users and distributions. You can’t modify, rebuild, pin, patch, mirror a snap, you’re not supposed to.
I’ve been invited to participate by the Snap developers and I’m hoping one day we’ll be able to integrate snap into Linux Mint. Although I’m worried about the impact on the market, I think snap could work both as a client and a file format, if it didn’t lock us into a single store. You might wonder why I’m so outspoken about this all of a sudden. There’s a certain sense of urgency which demands action on our side. Ubuntu is planning to replace the Chromium repository package with an empty package which installs the Chromium snap. In other words, as you install APT updates, Snap becomes a requirement for you to continue to use Chromium and installs itself behind your back. This breaks one of the major worries many people had when Snap was announced and a promise from its developers that it would never replace APT.
The plan isn’t just to delegate part of APT with Snap in the current Ubuntu releases, but also to backport this change towards Ubuntu 18.04 LTS. We don’t want this to affect Linux Mint.
I don’t think the points we’re raising here are well understood by the community. I hope we’ll talk with Ubuntu and the Snap project about this. We’re very interested in your feedback as well. A self-installing Snap Store which overwrites part of our APT package base is a complete NO NO. It’s something we have to stop and it could mean the end of Chromium updates and access to the snap store in Linux Mint.
32-bit support going forward
The announcement from Canonical that 32-bit support was to be dropped in Ubuntu 20.04 means that the future Linux Mint 20 will only be able to be released in 64-bit. Linux Mint 19.x is already available in 32-bit and it can be used until 2023. I think most people are happy with this and dropping 32-bit releases going forward makes sense in 2020.
Many questions were raised about multiarch support though. Steam, Wine and other popular applications used in Linux Mint 64-bit cannot work properly without 32-bit libraries.
Canonical addressed these questions and announced this wouldn’t be an issue. This is very important to us also. There’s no reason to think Ubuntu 20.04 will lack the proper support. If it did, or if the chosen solutions made Snap a requirement, we’re committed to solving them as well.
Talking with the Media
A new Slack team was started for journalists, bloggers, youtubers and podcasters to get in touch with us directly and more easily.
The idea behind this team is for the media to be able to quickly ask us questions, for us to give scoops and for this blog to not be the only source of information about Linux Mint.
We also encourage authors to let us know about their videos, articles and podcasts. That allows us to talk with them privately, to react to their content, to answer questions it might raise and to explain design decisions. Sometimes the content leads to improvements within Linux Mint and it’s also nice to be able to follow up.
If you’re a journalist, a blogger, a youtuber or a podcaster and you’re interested in getting in touch with us, let us know by email. If your media is serious, doesn’t show bias or promote controversies, we’ll be delighted to work with you and share more information about us and the projects we work on.
Sponsorships:
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