Linux Mint 18 “Sarah” KDE released and Available To Download

Linux Mint 18 is a long term support release which will be supported until 2021. It comes with updated software and brings refinements and many new features to make your desktop even more comfortable to use.

Linux Mint KDE Edition is an open source and free distribution of Linux, a special edition of the well known Linux Mint operating system that uses KDE Plasma as its default and only operating system, providing a modern and productive OS.

Distributed as 64/32-bit Live DVDs

The KDE edition of Linux Mint is a community project that can be downloaded from Softpedia or the official Linux Mint website as two Live DVD ISO images, one for each of the supported hardware platforms (64-bit and 32-bit). Please note that you must deploy these ISO images to either DVD discs or USB sticks in order to boot them from the BIOS of a PC.

What News on Linux Mint 18 “Sarah” KDE ?

Plasma 5.6 and SDDM

This edition of Linux Mint features the KDE Plasma 5.6 desktop environment. Here's a video showing some of its new features:



The default display manager is SDDM.

The APT sources include the Kubuntu Backports PPA, which provides updates to newer versions of the Plasma desktop.


Update Manager

The update manager received many improvements, both visual and under the hood.

The main screen and the preferences screen now use stack widgets and subtle animations, and better support was given for alternative themes (toolbar icons are now compatible with dark themes, application and status icons are now themeable and dimmed text is now rendered with dynamic colors).

Two new settings were added to let you see and select kernel updates. Even though these aren’t really updates, but the availability of packages for newer kernels, the manager is now able to detect them and to present them for installation to you as a traditional update. These are level 5 updates but the new settings let you configure them independently.

The kernel selection window was completely redesigned and is now preceded with an information screen which explains what kernels are, how to select them at boot time and what happens to DKMS modules when multiple kernels are installed.

Linux Mint no longer ships lists of fixes and lists of regressions specific to particular kernels. With so many kernel revisions, so many fixes and so many regressions happening sometimes on a daily basis, this information was quickly outdated. Instead, it was replaced with links to relevant sources of information. For instance, if you select a particular kernel you can now quickly access its changelog and see all the bug reports marked against it.

The update manager was already configurable but it wasn’t clear how to configure it, and why. In particular, the concepts of regressions, stability and security weren’t clearly explained. To raise awareness around these concepts and to show more information, a new screen is there to welcome you to the update manager and to ask you to select an update policy.

This screen is complemented with a help section which explains what’s at play and what to consider when choosing a policy.

Although this screen is only shown once and its main purpose is to present information, it can also be used as a quick way to switch between sets of preferences and it can be launched from the Edit->Update Policy menu.

Other improvements

HiDPI support is largely improved in Linux Mint 18. Firefox and most of the Mint apps (mintdesktop, mintsystem, mintwelcome, mintlocale, mintdrivers, mintnanny, mintstick, mint-common, mintupdate, mintbackup and mintupload) migrated to GTK3.

Popular applications such as Steam, Spotify, Dropbox or even Minecraft were added to the Software Manager and are now easier to install.

All editions now support OEM installations.

Gufw, the graphical firewall configuration tool, was added to the default software selection and is now installed by default.

Main components

Linux Mint 18 features SDDM, KDE Plasma 5.6, a Linux kernel 4.4 and an Ubuntu 16.04 package base.

LTS strategy

Linux Mint 18 will receive security updates until 2021.

Until 2018, future versions of Linux Mint will use the same package base as Linux Mint 18, making it trivial for people to upgrade.

Until 2018, the development team won't start working on a new base and will be fully focused on this one.

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Check the release note Linux Mint 18 KDE

Download Links

Linux Mint 18 “Sarah” KDE 32 bit
Linux Mint 18 “Sarah” KDE 64 bit