The Linux Mint founder, Clement Lefebvre, better know as Clem, has updated the Linux Mint community on the latest developments of Linux Mint 18.3, the release due in November or December. Aside from giving updates on the state of several applications, he also announced that the new release would carry the name ‘Sylvia’.
All Linux Mint 18.x releases are named after women whose names begin with ‘S’; previous releases in the series were called Sarah, Serena, and Sonya. Aside from the name reveal, Clem has also detailed the situation around backup tools, new system reporting tools, improvements to the Cinnamon desktop, and other system improvements.
First off, Linux Mint 18.3 will ship with two backup tools, mintBackup and Timeshift. The Linux Mint team is working with Timeshift developer Tony George in order to improve translations, desktop integration, add window progress, and improve HiDPI support. Timeshift focuses on creating and restoring system snapshots.
Next up, system reports. With 18.3, mintReport has begun being implemented, however, it’s not finished yet. In its current state, mintReport is able to gather crash reports, and uses apport as a backend in order to create a report whenever an application crashes; mintReport lists the reports and generates stack traces which developers can use to more easily fix bugs.
With Cinnamon 3.6, which ships in the upcoming release, we get HiDPI support which should make everything look a whole lot nicer on top of the range displays. The configuration module for Cinnamon Spices (applets, desklets, extensions, themes) has been completely overhauled. Lastly, Nemo extensions can pass the name of their configuration tool to Nemo in order to get a configure button in the Nemo plugins dialog, making it easier to integrate extensions properly and not clutter up the applications menu.
When Linux Mint 18.3 Sylvia finally does arrive, users should also notice a few improvements to apps like Driver Manager, which has gained improved HiDPI support, and X-apps which have received functionality improvements.
Source: The Linux Mint Blog