The next Mint version will be a point release in 17.x

Sep 15, 2014 11:36 GMT  ·  By

The Linux Mint developers have decided to announce the name of the next version of their distro, 17.1, and it's going to be "Rebecca."

The Linux Mint code names were never something very important, not for the developer and not for the community. It's hard to pinpoint the names of the previous releases, but that's not really an issue. The distribution is known for many other good things and the name is not really an important feature.

The current Linux Mint 17 release is "Quiana" and the previous one, for the 16.x branch, was "Petra." As you can see, everything follows a very simple alphabetical rule and the next one in line is "Rebecca."

A new name, a new release

Traditionally, the names of the new operating systems in the same branch (in this case it's 17.1 in the 17.x branch) should have had the same first letter. As you can imagine, finding interesting names beginning with the letter Q is actually quite hard, so a decision was made to switch to "R" (Quintal sounds cool, they should have considered it).

"Codenames on the 17.1 series were allowed to break the tradition. They won't start with a Q, as they should, but with an R instead. It wasn't easy to find a codename starting with Q initially, and with the move to LTS it's getting harder and harder as the series might get a total of 4 or more releases."

"The first 17.x point release will be Linux Mint 17.1 codename 'Rebecca'. Rebecca is of Hebrew origin and its meaning is "to bind". The name was borne in the Bible by the wife of Isaac. It was also made famous since 1938 by the book from Daphne du Maurier entitled "Rebecca" and adapted into a movie by Alfred Hitchcock in 1940," reads the announcement from the leader of the Linux Mint project, Clement Lefebvre.

Different name, same base

As all the users of Linux Mint already know, the distribution is based on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. A decision has been made that all the subsequent upgrades for the distro will use the same base. That means that 17.1, 17.2, and 17.3 will all use Ubuntu 14.04 as a base.

Ubuntu 14.04 is a long term support release and has five years of support. It was only natural for Linux Mint to adopt this kind of timetable. It's also worth noting that Linux Mint 17 users will have the option to upgrade or not to upgrade to the new version. Even if you don't upgrade, you will still receive security updates.

You can download Linux Mint 17 "Qiana" right now and give it a spin. You can upgrade from within when the new version becomes available.