14 DAY TRIAL // Linux Mint creator Clement Lefebvre recently published yet another monthly newsletter to inform the community behind the popular Ubuntu-based GNU/Linux distribution about what's coming to the project.
Now that Linux Mint 18.2 "Sonya" has hit the streets with all four officially supported flavors, with the Cinnamon 3.4, MATE 1.18, Xfce 4.12, and KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS desktop environment, it's time for Clement Lefebvre and his team to start working on the next major release, Linux Mint 18.3.
And the development was kicked off with a port of the Software Sources in-house built tool to the latest GTK+ 3 toolkit, along with support for HiDPI (High Dots Per Inch) displays, as well as HybridSleep support for the Cinnamon desktop environment. Also, it looks like the login screen was made more configurable.
"Options were added for automatic login as well as the ability to hide the user list and enter user names manually (this is useful for LDAP users)," said Clement Lefebvre in the newsletter. "Panel indicators can be enabled/disabled and now show tooltips. And last but not least, the Slick greeter now supports numlockx."
Software Manager to get multiple improvements and new features
Another in-house built tool that will receive improvements and new features during the development cycle of Linux Mint 18.3 is the Software Manager graphical package manager, or app store. Clement Lefebvre reveals that a huge amount of work went into revamping the tool, making it look modern.
For starters, Software Manager drops WebKit and was also ported to GTK+ 3, and received support for HiDPI displays. Under the hood, it's backend was ported to AptDaemon, and you no longer have to enter any password to browser apps as Software Manager now runs in user mode by default.
Of course, you'll still be asked to enter a password when installing or removing apps from your Linux Mint system, but Software Manager is now capable of remembering the credentials for a few minutes, so it won't bugger you to type in your password all the time.
Talking about browsing categories, they are now rendered almost instantly, and Software Manager should launch three times faster than before. Other than that, the user experience was enhanced a bit by making the layout similar to the GNOME Software package manager, simpler, cleaner, and more modern.
These and many other improvements are coming to Linux Mint 18.3 later this year, but, in the meantime, we hope that you already upgraded to Linux Mint 18.2 "Sonya" and discover its awesomeness. If you're new to Linux Mint, you can download the latest release right now via our web portal.