Monthly News – March 2024 – The Linux Mint Blog

Hi everyone,

We’ve got a lot to talk about this month, but first and foremost I’d like to thank our donors, our sponsors and all the people who support us.

Many thanks to you all.

Localization

Improvements were made for Linux Mint 22 installations to be better localized and to use less disk space than before.

Preinstalled packages for languages other than English and the one you select will be removed at the end of the installation. This was not optimized in previous Linux Mint releases. The removal of these packages in Linux Mint 22 will save a significant amount of disk space post-installation.

If you’re connected to the Internet during the installation, language packs for your selected language will be downloaded.

In addition, the following languages won’t require an Internet connections since their language packs will be present on the ISO image: English, German, Spanish, French, Russian, Portuguese, Dutch and Italian.

Deb822 support

The Software Sources tool will feature support for the new Deb822 format.

Pipewire

The default sound server in Linux Mint 22 will be Pipewire.

JXL support in Pix

The next version of Pix will support JXL images.

Kernels Series

To prioritize stability our 21.x releases shipped with Ubuntu LTS kernels (5.15). EDGE ISOs were made available, with HWE kernels, to bring support for new hardware.

Ubuntu 22.04.x releases used HWE kernels, and version 24.04 is set to use kernel 6.8.

During the last two years we didn’t observe significant differences in terms of stability between LTS and HWE series. Both were pretty stable. A growing number of users with new laptops/chipsets relied on EDGE images to be able to install Linux Mint though.

Linux Mint 22 will follow Ubuntu going forward and ship with new kernel series release after release.

XAPP Thumbnailer Gimp

A new thumbnailer for Gimp files was implemented.

It will be available in xapp-thumbnailers 1.2.4.

Online Accounts

GNOME Online Accounts, aka “GOA”, is a project which allows users to connect to their data in the cloud. This project was only designed for GNOME though so it doesn’t provide any front-end. It only provides libraries (namely libgoa and libgoa-backend).

Other than GNOME, many desktop environments integrated a front-end to these libraries in their control center: Cinnamon, Budgie, Unity, etc.

This project is important because it doesn’t just connect a desktop to the cloud, it’s used by many applications and libraries. Among other things you might use it to connect the Calendar application, the Thunderbird email program or the file browser to your online data.

With GNOME 46, libgoa/libgoa-backend 3.50 moved to GTK4. It can no longer be used by GTK3 applications.

To solve this problem a new XApp called GNOME Online Account GTK was created. As any XApp its goal is to work for everybody, in any desktop environment and in any Linux distribution.

This app makes it possible for Cinnamon/Budgie/Unity users to continue to use this functionality. It also provides it to any desktop that didn’t have access to it before (for instance: MATE and Xfce editions in Linux Mint).

It features two versions: One in GTK4 to support distributions which ship the new libgoa 3.50, and one in GTK3 for distributions which ship older versions of libgoa.

Thunderbird

In Ubuntu 24.04, Thunderbird was moved to a Snap.

Since we don’t want to ship with Snaps we had to choose between removing Thunderbird from the default software selection or packaging it. We decided to package it.

Thunderbird will continue to be available in Linux Mint 22 as a native .deb package.

Jargonaut

Work continues on the Chat Room application.

It received a new layout, a tray icon, image thumbnails, channel events, nickserv authentication, text formatting, /me commands, scrolling/catch-up support, auto-completion, spell-check…etc.

Package repositories

Our package repositories were tuned last month to accept a larger number of concurrent connections. Although this helped address some of the issues we had, they’re still really slow when the traffic is high.

We’re currently working on a new partnership with Fastly.

Fastly provides a global CDN with load balancing, TLS encryption and a powerful programmable cache engine called Varnish.

Their solution has the potential to significantly and consistently increase the speed of our repositories.

It also opens the door to better fault tolerance, better monitoring and logging.

We’re hoping to have more news on this soon. We’re really excited about it, the testing so far has been very promising.

Editions Stats

We also started experimenting with observability and monitoring solutions.

We don’t have news on this yet, but as part of our experiments we measured the popularity of the Linux Mint editions.

Note: This chart is based on the traffic on our website.

Cinnamon (also represented by EDGE and LMDE 6) represents 2/3 of our audience. Xfce is a solid second with a 1/5 share. MATE sits in third at 13%.

Advertising

Advertisement on our websites was drastically reduced.

No more popups, no more overlays.

Sponsorships:

Linux Mint is proudly sponsored by:

Donations in February:

$270, Oliver H.
$250 (15th donation), Tomasz E.
$213 (6th donation), Andreas S.
$200 (3rd donation), Timothy R.
$119 (5th donation), Oliver G.
$115 (4th donation), Philip W.
$108 (9th donation), Mimi
$108 (2nd donation), Daniel M.
$108 (2nd donation), Jessica R.
$108 (2nd donation), Ueli H.
$108, Anna S.
$100 (20th donation), Philip W.
$100 (4th donation), Neil F.
$100 (2nd donation), Dan
$100 (2nd donation), Soren K.
$100, Carl J.
$100, Craig D.
$100, Harlan K.
$100, HO-HUM ENTERPRISES
$100, Michael T.
$100, Randolph L.
$100, Stephen H.
$80 (2nd donation), Timothy R.
$70 (4th donation), Vincent F.
$69, Jeffrey C.
$65 (2nd donation), Klaus S.
$55 (6th donation), John Mc
$55 (4th donation), Olivia C.
$54 (21st donation), Naoise G. aka “Gaff”
$54 (20th donation), Bjarne K.
$54 (12th donation), Adam H.
$54 (4th donation), Ivan Y.
$54 (4th donation), Nicolas S.
$54 (4th donation), Rainer Werner B.
$54 (4th donation), Richard H.
$54 (4th donation), Stephan Tietz
$54 (3rd donation), Guillaume
$54 (3rd donation), Jyrki A.
$54 (3rd donation), Rolf H.
$54 (2nd donation), Boris G.
$54 (2nd donation), Chris B.
$54 (2nd donation), Goran N.
$54, António Salsinha – Graphic Designer
$54, Armin S.
$54, Christopher A.
$54, Dominic H.
$54, Dym S.
$54, Georg P.
$54, Gioele V.
$54, Holger H.
$54, Johan R.
$54, Johannes A.
$54, Miquel Lluís B.
$54, Uwe S.
$54, Willibald S.
$51, Joan F.
$50 (81th donation), Anthony C. aka “ciak”
$50 (60th donation), Michael R.
$50 (9th donation), Greg C.
$50 (6th donation), Ray W.
$50 (4th donation), Alan R.
$50 (4th donation), Benoit F.
$50 (4th donation), Jason B.
$50 (3rd donation), Douglas B.
$50 (3rd donation), German Genaro R.
$50 (3rd donation), Jerry R.
$50 (3rd donation), Mike H.
$50 (2nd donation), Daniel L.
$50 (2nd donation), Derek B.
$50 (2nd donation), Illya Konnoff K.
$50 (2nd donation), John D.
$50 (2nd donation), Patrick S.
$50 (2nd donation), Richard M. R.
$50, Andreas S.
$50, Charles D L.
$50, Emma H.
$50, Eugene W.
$50, Jacob A.
$50, James M.
$50, James N.
$50, Jeremy E.
$50, John R.
$50, John W.
$50, Matthew G.
$50, Michael F.
$50, Peter I.
$50, Richard G.
$50, Ryan R.
$50, William B.
$43 (4th donation), Wielant B.
$42 (7th donation), Martin K.
$40 (9th donation), John B.
$40 (5th donation), Clark R.
$40, Ethan H.
$35 (15th donation), B. H. .
$33, Cesar G.
$32 (9th donation), Alexander M.
$32 (5th donation), Henry T.
$32 (2nd donation), Lukas P.
$32, Enrico D.
$32, Fernando M.
$32, Jaroslaw C.
$32, Joerg B. aka “minerson”
$32, Steve E.
$30 (3rd donation), Birger M.
$30 (3rd donation), Kevin H.
$29 (2nd donation), Timothy L.
$27 (7th donation), Jonathan. H
$27 (6th donation), Niklas
$27 (2nd donation), René W.
$27, Dries
$27, Franz R.
$27, Sebastian L.
$27, Stéphane B.
$25 (36th donation), Linux Mint Sverige
$25 (15th donation), Richard N.
$25 (5th donation), Robert L. T.
$25, Douglas D.
$25, Mark W.
$25, Rick A.
$24, Khalid A.
$22 (45th donation), Peter E.
$22 (8th donation), Jorge R. R.
$22 (8th donation), Marek S. [LMDE SUPPORTER]
$22 (7th donation), Benjamin W.
$22 (7th donation), Danilo S.
$22 (6th donation), Chistoph B.
$22 (5th donation), Riccardo C.
$22 (4th donation), Andreas M. aka “AnMe2k22”
$22 (4th donation), Erkki J.
$22 (3rd donation), James P.
$22 (3rd donation), Jörg K. aka “Jku”
$22 (3rd donation), Neil S.
$22 (2nd donation), Alessandro P.
$22 (2nd donation), Juan B. S.
$22 (2nd donation), Lennart J.
$22 (2nd donation), Odie P.
$22 (2nd donation), Rafael V.
$22, Alexander S.
$22, Bastian S.
$22, Benjami L.
$22, Bernhard S.
$22, Carmen A.
$22, Christian B.
$22, David H.
$22, Denovan F.
$22, Francesco I.
$22, Georg W.
$22, Han M.
$22, Jean-pierre B.
$22, Jens G.
$22, Joerg M.
$22, John G.
$22, Karl Felix K.
$22, Klaus H.
$22, Leo
$22, Marcus B.
$22, Norbert J.
$22, Perrin M.
$22, Rafaz W.
$22, Roland R.
$22, Volker B.
$22, Werner M.
$20 (40th donation), John D.
$20 (21st donation), Aimee W.
$20 (21st donation), Pawel M.
$20 (17th donation), Kwan L. aka “DigitalHermit”
$20 (9th donation), Thevirtua
$20 (6th donation), Joel C.
$20 (6th donation), Ralph G.
$20 (5th donation), Curtis S.
$20 (5th donation), Joe V.
$20 (4th donation), David H.
$20 (4th donation), Miles S. P.
$20 (4th donation), Robin V.
$20 (3rd donation), Alex S.
$20 (3rd donation), Harald M.
$20 (3rd donation), Paul S.
$20 (2nd donation), A D R.
$20 (2nd donation), Brian U.
$20 (2nd donation), Carlos L.
$20 (2nd donation), Charles B.
$20 (2nd donation), Douglas K.
$20 (2nd donation), James P.
$20 (2nd donation), Michael S.
$20 (2nd donation), Michal E.
$20 (2nd donation), Samuel F.
$20 (2nd donation), Stephen S.
$20 (2nd donation), TONY aka “STRUZZIN ELECTRONICS”
$20 (2nd donation), William B.
$20, Benjamin L.
$20, Dale C.
$20, Dean L.
$20, Don M.
$20, Gary S.
$20, George M.
$20, Greg C.
$20, Helen H.
$20, Ivan N.
$20, James B.
$20, Jason W.
$20, John B M.
$20, John M.
$20, Kelly B.
$20, Larry G.
$20, Liam P.
$20, Logan H.
$20, Marie
$20, Marius V.
$20, Martin A.
$20, Nicholas M.
$20, Quickh.com
$20, Rebecca L.
$20, Rick Edwards aka ” ”
$20, Roger G.
$20, Serge S.
$20, Theodore H.
$18 (7th donation), ineuw
$16 (92th donation), Johann J.
$16 (73th donation), Andreas S.
$16 (3rd donation), Richard K.
$16 (2nd donation), Benito H.
$15 (4th donation), Laszlo F.
$15 (2nd donation), Terry P.
$13 (8th donation), Andrei Sinkevich
$12 (4th donation), John W.
$11 (46th donation), Daniel S.
$11 (23rd donation), Tugaleres.com
$11 (20th donation), Denys G.
$11 (8th donation), Axel R.
$11 (8th donation), Bengt Falke aka “Falke”
$11 (7th donation), Ronald S.
$11 (6th donation), Ivo H.
$11 (6th donation), RJ
$11 (5th donation), J. S. .
$11 (4th donation), Cor D.
$11 (4th donation), Harald H.
$11 (4th donation), Joel E.
$11 (3rd donation), Anthony S.
$11 (3rd donation), Björn H.
$11 (3rd donation), Ferruccio R.
$11 (3rd donation), Henry L. aka “Henry”
$11 (3rd donation), Jouko Tiilikainen aka “JT65”
$11 (2nd donation), Åke J.
$11 (2nd donation), Francisca M.
$11 (2nd donation), Gerard B.
$11 (2nd donation), Giorgio F. L.
$11 (2nd donation), Jan.c J.
$11 (2nd donation), jjb
$11 (2nd donation), John K.
$11 (2nd donation), Jose Maria
$11 (2nd donation), Martin Tobias S.
$11 (2nd donation), Rafel H.
$11 (2nd donation), Sebastian B.
$11 (2nd donation), Stefan E.
$11, Aleksei V.
$11, Andreas S.
$11, Anthony G.
$11, Athanasios F.
$11, Chelmerland
$11, Csaba G.
$11, Dafnis R.
$11, Dominik K.
$11, Fabio C.
$11, Frederic W.
$11, Giorgio D.
$11, Idris H.
$11, John van den Bosch aka “Jovadebo”
$11, Jorge C.
$11, Jose Antonio V.
$11, Jose Arturo T.
$11, Linus A.
$11, Luca Bellinazzi aka “ilfolle”
$11, Marco L.
$11, Matthias K.
$11, Michael M.
$11, Michele S.
$11, Morgan P.
$11, Nadine B.
$11, Neville M.
$11, Oséias K.
$11, Ralf L.
$11, Roberto T.
$11, Ruben de V.
$11, Sami S.
$11, Simon W.
$11, Sven-oliver K.
$11, Thibaut P.
$11, Walter S.
$11, Yan R.
$10 (95th donation), Thomas C.
$10 (89th donation), Frank K.
$10 (42th donation), Philip Woodward
$10 (34th donation), Sami Mannila
$10 (33rd donation), Carpet Cleaning Winnipeg
$10 (11th donation), Dave S.
$10 (9th donation), Gustavo A. B.
$10 (9th donation), platypus products
$10 (8th donation), Bogdan P.
$10 (6th donation), Jürgen
$10 (5th donation), Attila K.
$10 (5th donation), Peter Vangsgaard aka “pvangsgaard”
$10 (4th donation), Gary R.
$10 (3rd donation), Patrick P.
$10 (3rd donation), Robert E.
$10 (3rd donation), Robert M.
$10 (2nd donation), Ameen J.
$10 (2nd donation), Attila T.
$10 (2nd donation), Daniel T.
$10 (2nd donation), Gary I.
$10 (2nd donation), Glenn P.
$10 (2nd donation), Maciej D.
$10 (2nd donation), Tom V.
$10, Alben H.
$10, Csrl Richard S.
$10, Dan M.
$10, Editions Artisan Devereaux LLC
$10, Eduardo P.
$10, Georgette D.
$10, Gerardo A.
$10, Jack K.
$10, James W.
$10, Jeffrey K.
$10, Nickalou B.
$10, Randal C.
$10, Ronald Fernando F.
$10, Ryan Z.
$10, Steven S.
$10, True Altitude LLC aka “True Altitude LLC”
$10, Wojciech J.
$10, Won K.
$8 (4th donation), Matthew Gracie aka “Nethound”
$8 (3rd donation), John H.
$132 from 46 smaller donations