Catch up on stories from the past week (and beyond) at the Slashdot story archive

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×
Operating Systems Linux

Linux Mint 19 'Tara' Released (betanews.com) 75

Linux Mint, the maker of popular Linux distro, announced on Friday the general availability of a new version of their operating system. Called Linux Mint 19 "Tara", the new version offers a range of new features, improvements, and a promise that it would stick around for a while. Writing for BetaNews, Brian Fagioli: The most significant aspect of Linux Mint 19 is the new Ubuntu 18.04 LTS base. Tara will receive updates until 2023 -- very impressive. The kernel is at 4.15, and all three desktop environments are being updated too. Mate is now at version 1.2, Cinnamon gets bumped up to 3.8, and Xfce is updated to 4.12.

In Linux Mint 19, the star of the show is Timeshift, said, Clement Lefebvre, Linux Mint Project Leader. Although it was introduced in Linux Mint 18.3 and backported to all Linux Mint releases, it is now at the center of Linux Mint's update strategy and communication, he added. Thanks to Timeshift you can go back in time and restore your computer to the last functional system snapshot. If anything breaks, you can go back to the previous snapshot and it's as if the problem never happened.

This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.

Linux Mint 19 'Tara' Released

Comments Filter:
  • by Anonymous Coward

    I use xfce mainly, so will be waiting for the xfce release

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      This time they did a triple release : Mate, Cinnamon and XFCE.

      No KDE but all the Mint apps and tools fit in with the three above, being made as GTK3 apps with "file edit view" menu bar.
      XFCE hasn't had a new release. So here is it :)

  • by Bonker ( 243350 ) on Friday June 29, 2018 @04:42PM (#56868124)

    The open beta has been out for about a month prior to the mirrors starting their seed yesterday. It's had some fairly serious issues, mostly related to video. I've personally had some hardware lockups while watching videos on an integrated Intel adapter with VLC (and have submitted bug reports). I've also seen other bug reports and feature requests go simply ignored... Not even addressed as 'will fix' or 'won't fix'.

    I love me some Mint, but I personally feel that I'm going to have to treat this as a 'wait for the .1 release' before I personally consider it stable.

    • I'm on latest LTS Xubuntu using R5 2400G and having some lock up issues was hoping Mint (my regular ) distro would be better. Gamin with Xonotic is pretty smooth but I get some system freezes when watching video and video editing.

    • by iggymanz ( 596061 ) on Friday June 29, 2018 @05:14PM (#56868322)

      Ubuntu 18.04 has those same issues.

      you know Mint doesn't make those video drivers or VLC, right?

      of course they are dependent on upstream for any solutions to those problems. of course they won't say they'll fix it, how could they?

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Kjella ( 173770 )

        Ubuntu 18.04 has those same issues. you know Mint doesn't make those video drivers or VLC, right? of course they are dependent on upstream for any solutions to those problems. of course they won't say they'll fix it, how could they?

        Why would the average user know any of that? If it comes as part of Linux Mint then it could be a packaging bug. It could be an outdated version. Even if it's a valid upstream bug the user shouldn't have to know where all the thousands of packages come from and what their bug reporting process is.

        • Ubuntu 18.04 has those same issues. you know Mint doesn't make those video drivers or VLC, right? of course they are dependent on upstream for any solutions to those problems. of course they won't say they'll fix it, how could they?

          Why would the average user know any of that? If it comes as part of Linux Mint then it could be a packaging bug. It could be an outdated version. Even if it's a valid upstream bug the user shouldn't have to know where all the thousands of packages come from and what their bug reporting process is.

          That may be the case, but I'm not sure what the solution might be. It seems the average user is in the same boat with Winders.

        • Nope, even Mint site itself Clearly explains what Mint is and where it comes from. All driver issues the base Ubuntu has, MINT will have of course. MINT team makes some things but drivers not on list. Neither is VLC.

    • Thanks for the tip. I'm still on 17 and was going to jump right on this, reformat and start fresh, as soon as it came out. But I agree, that breaks Rule One of OS Upgrades: Always wait for the .1 release.

      Besides this gives me time to scrap all to pr0n to an external drive.

      Wait, did I say that out loud?

      • 17 still got a year of support. I'm hesitant of upgrading from 17.3 kde , especially as 19 doesn't have a kde and I sort of insist on using kdesvn (which was missing in 18 and all kde themes were ugly) as it seems to be the only svn with proper filemanager integration that sort of works.
    • by Tukz ( 664339 )

      Isn't this the norm of software? Always wait for .1 release.

      I'm on 18.3 and I see no reason to rush to 19 just yet.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Year of the Linux Desktop?

    • Year of the Linux Desktop?

      It is at my house, and probably yours as well. What else matters?

    • I've got my aged mother running Linux Mint. She doesn't know the difference. Linux is absolutely ready to be a Windows replacement for the average user, and has been for some time. You don't need to learn a new OS paradigm, you don't need the command line, you sure as hell don't have to download old drivers from sketchy websites for old hardware. It's just never going to happen because PCs come with Windows installed.
  • by Anonymous Coward

    Ubuntu did work as guest in a VM.
    But Linux Mint didn't work as guest in a VM.

    Why?
    Is there any kind of lock anti-guest-virtualization?

    • Maybe I'm having better luck or you're doing more strenuous work, but LM Xfce has worked okay for me in a VM under winXP.
  • No KDE edition (Score:5, Informative)

    by Stephen J Sweeney ( 3389523 ) on Friday June 29, 2018 @04:56PM (#56868230)

    Most Slashdot reader probably know this already, but worth mentioning is that there is no KDE edition of Tara. KDE editions were stopped with the previous release (18.3).

    https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3418

    • Re:No KDE edition (Score:5, Insightful)

      by SeaFox ( 739806 ) on Friday June 29, 2018 @06:25PM (#56868654)

      KDE Mint feels kinda redundant to me when you have Kubuntu [kubuntu.org] and KDE's own Neon [kde.org]. Why do we need a KDE version of a distro that is a derivative of another distro that is a derivative of Debian? So we can play more games of point the fingers when something doesn't work right?

      • by Anonymous Coward

        You can't use Neon on a laptop. It doesn't have any wifi drivers.
        You can't use Kubuntu on anything. It's been crap since Intrepid.
        Linux Mint KDE Edition has been the only distro for a long time, and they've discontinued it.

        • by _merlin ( 160982 )

          There's Fedora KDE spin...

        • by pnutjam ( 523990 )
          OpenSuse had a top notch KDE environment.
        • by Anonymous Coward

          Coulda fooled me, KDE Neon is running fine on my Dell M6700 laptop, and has been my daily driver for a year now. There's a bug in plasmashell where the toolbar occasionally goes unresponsive and I have to restart plasma, but apart from that (and no popular hex editor with UTF 8 support?!), all good.

  • by GodWasAnAlien ( 206300 ) on Friday June 29, 2018 @05:59PM (#56868536)

    Why use Mint over parent Ubuntu?

    Are there special Mint packages that you cannot just apt-get on Ubuntu.

    And the the obvious next question.
    Why use Ubuntu over the parent Debian? The Debian-Ubuntu delta is smaller than ever now that Ubuntu uses GNOME3 and wayland.
    I assume the answers here is more obvious than with Mint:
    - a more user friendly installer
    - GNOME3 with unity-like extensions
    - larger user base (more well tested versions)

    • by Tyger-ZA ( 1886544 ) on Friday June 29, 2018 @06:23PM (#56868644)

      It's a hierarchy: Debian -> Ubuntu -> Mint and at each level I gain something useful.

      Debian has a stable free software base to work with.

      It's easier to install 3rd party software on Ubuntu than it is on Debian.

      With Mint + Cinnamon I don't get a bullshit UI by default like I would on Ubuntu.

      Yeah I know that they killed their PoS UI eventually but they've switched to something that still isn't as good as Mint;

      in this case "good" meaning that it resembles what a desktop looked like before the rise of mobile UI idiocy being ported to the desktop

      • by Anonymous Coward

        1. It has all the same security benefits of Ubuntu as long as you learn to manage the updates.

        2. It has a friendly UI that is very similar to Windows.

        3. Most anything that runs on Ubuntu will run on Mint.

        4. The Mint team genuinely cares about and listens to user input.

        5. Mint is large and established enough to where it is well-supported and won't likely fall by the wayside like many other distros.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Debian doesn't have AppArmor by default (dunno how easy it is to manually enable and how it then works), and IIRC no firewall (ufw) on by default with sane defaults.
      Debian has less polish here and there, and a less predictable release-/lifecycle (in case you care about that).
      The (often only configuration) changes are minimal and can be implemented on Debian easily.
      But for non-techie end users like my mom I'd recommend Ubuntu over Debian, because when you add up all those tiny little defaults/changes, on the

  • Looks like a typo. I'm currently running mate-1.22 and it's rather old. What version is it actually running?
  • Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Saturday June 30, 2018 @01:54AM (#56869774)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • I will stick with FreeBSD. I don't want no log files or daemons that shut off without errors or logs and want things like modern NFS support that Linux can no longer do besides Duuvan

They are called computers simply because computation is the only significant job that has so far been given to them.

Working...