New Mint Minted
Version 16 of the popular Linux desktop reveals new tools, edge-snapping, and performance improvements.
The Linux Mint team has released of Linux Mint 16 "Petra." Previous versions of Ubuntu-based Mint have made it one of the most popular desktop Linux distributions in the world -- and put it in first place on the distrowatch download list. The Mint team appears poised to maintain that momentum, announcing several changes to the desktop environments, as well as system and performance improvements under the hood.
Mint posted separate press announcements for the separate editions centered around the Cinnamon and Mate desktops environments. Both versions include performance improvements for the Software Manager and Update Manager. Mint ISO images are no longer compressed, which means they take more space but perform better in Live boot scenarios. Both versions also report system changes resulting in safer kernel updates, faster boot, better EFI support, and better support for the Steam game engine.
Cinnamon has a new user management applet, as well as updates to the Nemo file manager and new edge-snapping feature based on the Snap feature of Xbox One. The Mate edition (based on Gnome 2) gets a new login screen, a new tool for formatting USB sticks, and many artwork improvements.
See the Linux Mint website for information on downloading and installing Mint 16.
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