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.
I stuck with GNOME for a little bit, but the more I used it, the more I hated it for more reasons than I care to list... So I took Linux Mint for a spin, with Cinnamon.
To be honest, I'm still not sold on the Microsoft Windows-style menu that Linux Mint uses (I haven't used a Microsoft Windows-based operating system outside of occasional use in the workplace in years!), but I like it slightly better than GNOME and for the most part, Linux Mint works pretty good. It looks good too, though I might be a little bias because green is one of my favorite colors.
As others have said, Linux Mint is not perfect, but it's great for beginners and the lazy alike... It's almost like the Linux equivalent of Apple macOS - because it "just works".
Last edited by Cyba.Cowboy on 5 February 2020 at 11:06 am UTC
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