Linux Mint Newsletter Issue 1
From The Linux Mint Wiki
Contents |
Bianca BETA 014
The first release candidate for Bianca was released 5 days ago and there has been a fantastic amount of feedback on it. A lot of people have downloaded it (about 55,000 downloads so far) and this initially slowed down our server a lot. However the community was quick to put mirrors in place and a torrent to download.
Many of you came back with bug reports and their experience with Bianca BETA 014 and we have started to organize a bug list which you can find here: http://www.linuxmint.com/wiki/index.php/Bugs_in_Bianca_BETA_014
As you can see, some of the bugs were quite serious but we're fast in fixing them and if things go as planned we should be ready on the 20/02/2007 to release the final version of Bianca without the need for a second release candidate.
After Bianca
What will we do after the stable release of Bianca (scheduled for the 20/02/2007)?
Well, there won't be any Linux Mint 2.3. With Feisty Fawn released in April and Linux Mint 3.0 following it, we can confirm that Linux Mint 2.2 (Bianca) will be the last release within the 2.x family.
This leaves us a lot of time between 2.2 and 3.0 and we're planning on using it to see what we can do with KDE. It is still unclear though whether we'll release a "Bianca KDE Edition", or a "Bianca DVD Edition" (which would contain Gnome and KDE, and eventually XFCE as well).
A lot of people asked us if we were going to switch back to KDE and complained about our lack of strategy in this regard. We understand that people prefer Gnome or KDE and that this might even make a difference in which distribution they decide to use. However we're not blindly using Gnome or KDE because we like one more than the other and if we use one rather than the other at a particular time it's simply because we think we can achieve a better desktop with it. In the end of the day it's down to only one thing: the quality of the resulting desktop.
Our main desktop is still Gnome because at the moment this is the desktop that represents the best option for us to build on top on, the same way Ubuntu is our current base distribution.
However KDE is my personal favorite and I know people like XFCE a lot. So now that we have time between Bianca and 3.x we can experience with these two desktops and even if they're not our default desktop we might find ways to automate KDE/XFCE variations of our future releases to make it easier for us to release KDE/XFCE editions every time we come up with a new Gnome release.
Donations and Advertisements
We have received a lot of donations in 2006 and with the Google ads that we put on our website we have finally managed to sort out or hosting problems. This is also thanks to Michael from lintelligence.de who gave us a really good deal and was always there to support us. We're now looking at the possibility of advertising for Linux Mint on other websites to make our community and our user base grow even faster.
Buy a computer online with Linux Mint pre-installed on it!
That's right! It's still too soon to give names, prices, links or any kind of details yet, but we were talking to somebody who's starting a company and plans to sell computers online with Linux Mint Bianca installed by default as their operating system. So if you're planning to buy a computer in the near future, hold on.. there might just be something there for you. We'll have more information about this in our next issue.
