Linux Mint 18 beta is “just around the corner” say devs
Linux Mint project leader Clement Lefebvre has announced the latest developments in Linux Mint 18 via the Linux Mint blog.
“Thank you all for your donations and for your support. We’ve received a lot of help in preparation for the next release,” said Clement Lefebvre. “The ISO images are getting close to passing QA (quality testing) so we could see a Beta release early this month. Linux Mint 18 is just around the corner. I hope you’ll enjoy it.”
The Mint team is expecting to receive lots of suggestions and help from the community to find bugs and polish the operating system before it pushes out a solid stable release subsequently with the beta release.
As one expects from Clem’s blog posts, a lot of extra information is shared by him when he replies to people leaving remarks. He disclosed this time that after the initial stable ISO release, the Mint developers will work on an advancement path for users of Linux Mint 17.3 so they can effortlessly move to Linux Mint 18.
Unlike the Linux Mint 17.x series that was based on Ubuntu 14.04, Linux Mint 18 is based on Ubuntu 16.04. As a result, offering an upgrade path to Linux Mint 18 will be a huge challenge than between incremental Linux Mint 17.x versions.
One commenter who told the Mint team to take their time with the Mint 18 release, quoting constant stability, Clem responded to that by saying:
“We did, and by the time we get to the BETA we’ll have tested everything we planned to test, fixed everything we planned to fix and there’ll be nothing left in the roadmap as outstanding known bugs or work items. That said, we’re using a new base.. I’m sure we’ll find new regressions and challenges to overcome, but to work on that we’ll need your feedback, and that will start with the BETA phase.”
Linux Mint 18 will wobble things up a little bit, as it sees the start of a new theme and icon set. Since the Mint-X theme was introduced in Linux Mint 10, which launched in November 2010, the new theme signifies the first major refurbishment of the look and feel of Mint. Linux Mint 18 will receive security updates for five years, which means that the users will be able to use the OS as well into 2021.
