Mint 18's New Themes and Applications, New Mint Box
Clement Lefebvre today added some additional tidbits from early Mint 18 planning in his monthly newsletter. A few weeks ago he'd said version 18 would finally feature a new theme and today he said they would be developing new applications as well. In addition, a new mini PC featuring Mint was introduced.
Mint founder and lead, Clement Lefebvre, today wrote in the monthly newsletter that some folks were concerned about his earlier tease of a new look for upcoming Mint 18. He felt the need to clarify that he's only talking about a new theme, no major redesigns or direction changes. He said, "We know who we are, we know what you like and we can tell from your feedback what you expect." The current theme will still be available as an alternative as well.
The new theme, Lefebvre said, would look "more modern without looking minimalistic," marked by subtle colors, and overall professional appearance. They're going for the "same feeling" as with the current Mint 17 look, but updated. Now I'm "scared."
Another major topic covered in this month's news is X-Apps. X-Apps are generic GTK applications that will work on all of Mint's GNOMEy desktops. He said that will save duplicative work, provide a consistent and native look across editions, and allow for new features in the future. So far, they have a text editor as proof of concept.
And the last major announcement out of the Mint camp today was the release of Airtop, a new mini PC from the folks at Compulab. Compulab is the same company that makes the MintBox Mini and MintBox 2. This latest version is something of a mini powerhouse featuring either a Xeon E3 v4 with an NVIDIA Quadro M4000 or a Core i7 5775C with an GeForce GTX 950. They also sport dual Gigabit Ethernet, four display support, and a five-year warranty. I want one.
In other news:
* StreamComputing launches GEGL-OpenCL project
* 6.3% of game developers make Linux versions
* openSUSE OBS gets new hardware