Linux Mint's Clement Lefebvre wrote another of their monthly progress reports on how Linux Mint and their Cinnamon desktop are doing and it's all great news.
In regards to their funding, they've managed to smash another record. From donations made by users, the previous record in a single month was April last year at $24,170 but in December 2019 they managed to pull in $25,352 showing that plenty of people appreciate their work.
They're now working on LMDE 4 (Linux Mint Debian Edition), their own special brand of Debian that's a testing area for if "Ubuntu was ever to disappear" using Debian as a base just like Ubuntu. LMDE 4 will ship with all the improvements the last main release of Linux Mint had including the addition of boot-repair, their system reports feature, better language settings, HiDPI and artwork improvements, new boot menus and tons more. Additionally, they're going to be adding a new boot menu option for NVIDIA users which install the NVIDIA driver "on the fly, so both the live session and the installed OS work out of the box" which is great.
Also mentioned is the Cinnamon desktop environment version 4.6, which is set to get some big display improvements. You can finally set the frequency of your monitors, fractional scaling for much better HiDPI support and each monitor can be set differently.
I'm quite a fan of Cinnamon, a nice no-frills environment that mostly just works and stays out of your way and it just keeps getting better. Linux Mint continues to be a great beginner-friendly Linux distribution.
Lastly, they mentioned the MintBox 3, a compact mini-PC is now shipping with two different models with the Pro at $2,499 and the Basic at $1,399. Both very pricey but also quite powerful with the Basic model having an Intel i5-9500 and the Pro having an i9-9900K + GeForce GTX 1660 Ti 6 GB. So while it may seems expensive, it's not a bad price for such a compact unit and it must sell since this is the third generation.
You can see the official post here.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
It is indeed fairly nice and I think one of the easiest interfaces for people switching from Windows (or just testing the waters in general).
TheLinuxPleb Feb 3, 2020
Really nice job from them. :)
Last edited by TheLinuxPleb on 3 February 2020 at 10:22 am UTC
Anyway, I had to give up using Cinnamon on a computer I own for this specific reason and move to KDE which, as far as I can tell, deals best with this, but which unfortunately is too cluttered and messy for me. Looking forward to going back to Mint when this is implemented! :-)
Nevertheless Feb 3, 2020
That goes for the whole distro as well!
In all those years I use Mint (constantly also trying different distros on other partitions to keep informed), it never "just fell apart" after a system update, like other distros I used (often rolling release).
It might not be "sexy" to use a distro that others call a "beginners distro" and that has seasoned software in someones opinion, but it almost always, like you say about Cinnamon, just works and never stands in my way.
Nvidia integration in LMDE 4 is really great and is also exactly what I missed!
GustyGhost Feb 3, 2020
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