Linux Mint Project Leader Clement Lefebvre, otherwise known as “Clem” released a blog post on Sept. 18, giving some information about the upcoming release of Linux Mint 18.3, dubbed “Sylvia.”
In his blog post Lefebvre gave some ideas to some of the pieces of software and changes that will be coming, such as the inclusion of the popular system restoration tool Timeshift.
For those of you who haven’t used Timeshift, it’s an application that creates snapshots of your system, and then restores them later, similar to Windows System Restore, or Mac OS’s Time Machine.
image by http://www.teejeetech.in/p/timeshift.html
Lefebvre says, “The feedback you gave us last month helped us further improve our backup tool and identify the need for a system restore utility.
We talked to Tony George, the developer behind Timeshift. Timeshift is an excellent tool which focuses on creating and restoring system snapshots. It’s a great companion to mintBackup which focuses on personal data. The two applications will be installed by default and complement each others in Linux Mint 18.3. We’re currently working with Tony to improve translations and desktop integration for Timeshift, add window progress support into it and improve its support for HiDPI.”
Lefebvre also went on to talk about another tool that will generate crash reports and forward them off to the Mint development team, “At the end of the last development cycle I mentioned the idea of a tool which would bring information to users and help them troubleshoot issue. This is an ambitious project and we’re still not sure it will land in the next release, at least not fully…
I say not fully because this tool received its codename (“mintReport”), because we started implementing it and because one of its feature is now completely ready and will be shipped with Linux Mint 18.3. That feature is the gathering of crash reports, using apport as a backend, a report is made whenever an application crashes. MintReport lists these reports and generates stack traces for them.
Non-experienced users rarely know how to produce a stack trace and that information is crucial to developers when they’re not able to reproduce a bug. This tool will make it much easier for anyone to produce these traces. It also suggests the installation of debugging symbols (-dbg packages) when these are missing and warns in case of mismatches. Linux Mint 18.3 will ship with mintReport and debugging symbols by default.”
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This could be paramount for the development team trying to find and solve bugs with the upcoming future released of Linux Mint; assuming that users utilize the feature. Granted, many people prefer tend to disable things that ‘phone home’ and if such an option to do so with this tool is available, it should be expected that many will do so.
Lastly, there have been changes to some applications and software, most notably the Cinnamon Desktop Environment, as Lefefbvre explains, “HiDPI will be enabled by default in Cinnamon 3.6.
The configuration module for cinnamon spices (applets, desklets, extensions, themes) was completely revamped, Nemo extensions are now able to pass the name of their configuration tool to Nemo in order to get a “Configure” button in the Nemo plugins dialog; this makes it easier to integrate extensions properly and not clutter the application menu.”
The addition of HiDPI will be great for users who currently may struggle or have issues thanks to their high end monitors.
Overall, it looks like the upcoming release of Linux Mint 18.3 will have some very wonderful additions, and some great changes.
Now you: What are your thoughts on the changes? Do you find these useful? What changes would YOU make? Let us know in the comments!