The developers are working on the KDE and Xfce flavors

Dec 14, 2014 19:14 GMT  ·  By

Linux Mint 17.1 "Rebecca" release was a great success and many users have already upgraded to the new release, but there are other flavors also being worked on and they are very close to the final version.

The MATE and Cinnamon flavors are the most used in the Linux Mint family, but there are others that need to be considered, like Xfce and KDE. The developers usually pay closer attention to them only after the initial release of the main editions and that's the main reason they usually have at least a month of delay.

Starting with Linux Mint 17.x, the developers have decided to base their systems only on Ubuntu LTS releases. This allows them to provide much better support for their versions and it gives them a stable base. The upgrades to their own OS are easier to make because they don't need to constantly adapt to a new base. The support period for the distro is also increased to five years, which is definitely a bonus.

Linux Mint 17.1 with KDE and Xfce are pretty close

The developers have been working on the two editions for quite some time and it looks like they are ready to promote the Release Candidates, although it's unclear whether the final versions will be made available in 2014 or users will have to wait until the first weeks of 2015.

"KDE was upgraded to 4.14 and MDM received support for KDE Wallet (the wallet is now created and opened in the background, so no user interaction is necessary). Xfce was given out-of-the-box support for Compiz (just like in the MATE edition), Xfburn received Blu-ray support, the Whisker menu was upgraded and the default configuration was refined. The stable release for these two editions was estimated for the end of December but the RCs are a few days late."

"Christmas and the New Year will certainly eat a few days and there are items in the roadmap which were postponed but might come back into 17.1 as the dev. team is still looking into them (in particular we’re not happy with the look and feel of xscreensaver and with the fact that unlocking the session doesn’t unlock the screensaver in KDE and Xfce). It’s too hard to say just yet whether the stable ISOs will be out this year or the next," said the leader of the Linux Mint project, Clement Lefebvre.

For the time being, you can only download Linux Mint 17.1 Cinnamon or MATE, but we'll keep you informed with the release of the KDE and Xfce editions.

Linux Mint 17.1 "Rebecca" (10 Images)

Linux Mint 17.1 "Rebecca" Cinnamon desktop
Linux Mint 17.1 "Rebecca" Cinnamon launcherLinux Mint 17.1 "Rebecca" Cinnamon graphics
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