14 DAY TRIAL // The final version of Linux Mint 17 KDE "Qiana," based on the KDE 4.13.0 branch, has been officially released and is now available for download.
The Linux Mint developers have finally launched the KDE flavor of their latest iteration and it shares numerous features and options with its older brothers, Cinnamon and MATE.
"Linux Mint 17 is a long term support release which will be supported until 2019. It comes with updated software and brings refinements and many new features to make your desktop even more comfortable to use," reads the official announcement.
The developers of this distribution said a while ago that new Mint version would be using only the LTS versions of Ubuntu. This means that the next three iterations of Linux Mint will use the same base, until the next Ubuntu 16.04 LTS arrives, in two years.
The Update Manager is just one of the packages that have been updated in the new Qiana edition of Linux Mint. So many features and changes have been implemented for this software alone that it's practically a new one.
"A new 'type' column was added to differentiate between traditional updates, security updates, backports and romeo updates. Security updates can now bypass safety levels and two new options were added for you to decide if they should always be visible and if they should be selected. By default these options are respectively set to True and to False," say the devs on their website.
According to the changelog, the Driver Manager is now capable of installing drivers without an Internet connection, it's now much easier for instance to install the operating system on laptops equipped with Broadcom wireless chipsets, the multi-monitor support for MDM has been improved, the HTML greeter now comes with HiDPI support, and the "Software Sources" configuration tool received a few UI and usability improvements.
Also, a warning has been added against the use of the "backport" and "romeo" components of the Linux Mint repositories, Wbkit has been dropped for the welcome screen, a new Semantic Search with new features is now available with KDE 4.13, the distribution now has UEFI support, the problems with NVIDIA-related freezes have been fixed, it's now possible to boot with non-PAE CPUs, the DVD Playback with VLC is working again, and numerous other fixes and changes have been implemented.
Check the official announcement for more details about this release. Users can download Linux Mint 17 KDE "Qiana" right now from Softpedia.
