Mint 18.1 Xfce Nearing, Weird Names, Die Linux Myths
Clement Lefebvre today announced a beta release of Mint 18.1 Xfce with updated software, refinements, and "many new features." MakeUseOf chuckled at some of the crazy names folks pin on Linux distributions and Jan Vermeulen picked up on a Reddit conversation discussing Linux myths that "need to die." Elsewhere in Linux news, Bruce Byfield compared and contrasted Debian and Ubuntu while Mark Shuttleworth discussed Snappy vs. Flatpak.
Clement Lefebvre said Mint 18.1 is a long term supported release, so Xfce users are probably getting a bit anxious for their upgrade. Well, today marked another step in its fruition. Linux Mint 18.1 Xfce Beta was announced today coming with "updated software and brings refinements and many new features to make your desktop even more comfortable to use." The stable release should be ready next month, but early testers can get a download link from the release announcement.
Bertel King, Jr. had a little fun at some of our expense today because of the names of our operating systems. They began the chuckles with Gentoo, which is the well known moniker of a certain species of penguin. Ubuntu, CrunchBang, and Manjaro were also singled out. But Puppy Linux? How is that funny? Or Fedora or Peppermint? They even took a swipe at PCLOS saying, " Perhaps there’s a such thing as being too literal." Anyway, it was all in good fun, so go see the rest.
From names to myths, it was fun day in Linux news. Jan Vermeulen reported on some myths users really feel should die a merciful death. Of course, Linux is hard to use is on the list, but it contains a few new entries to the discussion this time around. One is Linux is developed by volunteer programmers, which isn't true anymore. Even Linus himself has been paid handsomely by big companies to run Linux development. Most of today's contributors are paid by someone. You must do everything in the command line is one that I wonder about. I mean, do people really still believe that out there? Linux sucks for gaming, Linux is for everyone, Linux is unsupported are some of the others discussed, but see all the myths that should die.
Jamie Watson is back from the mothership and test driving PIXEL, the Raspberry Pi system that's been ported to desktop chips. The developmental snapshots are live systems with no installer, but worked on just about every machine he could stick his disk in. He said it's pretty and will provide Raspberry Pi owners consistency across their machines. He gave a good overview of PIXEL, so go check that out.
In other news:
* Try Hard Parking, an infuriating top-down parking game that actually looks hilarious