Linux Mint 18.2 Sonya Released, will be supported until 2021
Linux Mint 18.2 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.
Clement Lefebvre has announced the availability of a new release of Linux Mint. The new version, Linux Mint 18.2, is the latest update in the 18.x series and is built upon a base of Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. The new release will be supported until 2021 and is available in four editions (Cinnamon, KDE, MATE and Xfce). Linux Mint 18.2 features improvements to the X-Apps cross-desktop applications with improved short-cuts coming to the Xplayer video player and line sorting coming to the Xed text editor. The login screen is now powered by LightDM running the Slick greeter and includes support for HiDPI. The update manager has been tweaked to help users find their ideal balance between security updates and system stability
Important info:
The release notes provide important information about known issues, as well as explanations, workarounds and solutions.
To read the release notes, please visit:
“Release Notes for Linux Mint 18.2 Cinnamon”
What's New on Linux Mint 18.2 "Sonya" :
Cinnamon 3.4- One of the most notable improvements in Cinnamon 3.4 is the handling of desktop icons.
- Icons can now be automatically aligned on a grid, either in lines or in columns.
- They can also be automatically sorted in various ways: By name, by size, by type or by modified date.
- You can also change desktop icon sizes with a click of a button, and desktop icons are now handled in their own separate process, which isn't tied to other nemo windows.
- The various plugins of the settings daemon also now run in their own separate processes and are independent of each others. It is therefore now much easier to identify which plugin might be responsible for high memory or CPU usage, and when a plugin crashes it no longer affects the rest of the Cinnamon backend.
- To provide better performance to the Cinnamon desktop, the CJS Javascript interpreter was rebased and now runs on mozjs 38.
Cinnamon Spices
You can add themes, applets, desklets and extensions to your Cinnamon desktop. These add-ons are known as "spices" and they are maintained by 3rd party artists and 3rd party developers.
The Cinnamon Spices website was rewritten from scratch.
The goal wasn't only to make it look better. This is part of a huge project to make spices more secure than before and to guarantee better quality and better compatibility with the Cinnamon desktop.
The site supports oauth authentication via Google, Facebook and Github to let visitors comment and like their favorite spices. As a consequence, it no longer stores passwords.
The maintenance of the spices themselves was moved to Github and every single change is now reviewed by the Linux Mint team to guarantee spices cannot be used for malicious purposes.
The development workflow was changed to allow anyone to provide bug fixes and translations to Cinnamon spices.
Along with spices authors, the Linux Mint team is now directly involved in the maintenance of all Cinnamon spices. Many spices were removed, many were fixed, many were updated and the team is now able to add support to spices not only for current versions of Cinnamon but even for upcoming ones.
Overall, this is a huge improvement for Cinnamon because the quality of the spices has an impact on how the desktop is perceived. We're getting closer and closer to a situation where everything "just works", where quality spices are easy to find and where they work in your language.
Blueberry
Bluetooth support is much improved in Linux Mint 18.2.
Here is what the new Blueberry user interface looks like:
A stack switcher was added in the toolbar and new settings were added to the application:
OBEX file transfers are now supported out of the box, so you can send files very easily over Bluetooth to your computer from any remote device.
An option was added also to make it easier to change the Bluetooth name of your computer.
Last but not least, in addition to its cross-desktop system tray, Blueberry now provides a Cinnamon applet which uses symbolic icons and looks similar to other status applets, such as the power, sound or network applets. When this applet is present, the tray icon is automatically hidden.
Xed
A lot of work went into Xed, the generic text editor.
The user interface features really exciting visual improvements. For instance, it comes with smart side and bottom bars which automatically adjust to the loaded content and which you can hide or show with a click of a button.
The ability to prefer dark themes was added, so if you’re using Mint-Y-Darker for instance, you can select whether your text editor should be light or dark.
“Word wrap” was made more accessible and added to the menu, so you can enable/disable that function straight from the menus, without going in the preferences.
You can also select a few lines and sort them by pressing F10, or by using “Edit -> Sort Lines”.
You can now zoom in and out with the menu, keyboard shortcuts or even the mouse wheel to modify the size of the text.
The search now supports regular expressions.
You can now switch between tabs with the mouse wheel.
Libpeas Python extensions are now supported so porting Gedit 3 extensions to Xed is now very easy.
Xplayer
The media player, Xplayer, also received improvements to its user interface.
All the controls and the seeker bar were placed on the same line and the statusbar was removed to make the application more compact.
Further information and screen shots can be found in the project's release announcements
