The Linux Mint team recently announced that it will be releasing Linux Mint 19.1 ‘Tessa’ in November or December of this year. As we approach the next release, the team will be posting updates about the new software that will come bundled in the new version. As part of the September monthly news update, the project’s head, Clem Lefebvre, announced several new pieces of software including a faster file manager.
In its latest blog post, the firm announced that Nemo 4.0, Linux Mint’s file manager, was “lightning fast” after having being optimised in several ways. Lefebvre described the results of the work as “very impressive” and that it feels extremely light. Additionally, icon sizes and spacing within Nemo supposedly look better. Nemo will also show you the creation times of files as long as your partition is not encrypted, uses the ext4 file system, and your system runs Linux kernel 4.15 or higher.
In Mint 19, the Welcome Screen app introduced a new UI element, the XappStackSideBar, essentially a sidebar used for navigating different screens in a window. In Mint 19.1, this element has been included in other Mint’s home grown Xapp preference menus making them look much tidier than they are right now.
One of the things that the Mint team is known for is making small and conservative changes rather than pulling the rug out and starting again, this enables the developers to keep bringing users a similar environment time and time again while including improvements. One small improvement that has been made to the text editor, Xed, is that the status bar will now indicate whether you’re currently using spaces or tabs – that contentious issue will now be front and centre when you begin editing code within Xed.
There are a few other changes that have been mentioned although most users won’t ever have to encounter them. If you’d like to find out more about the changes being announced this month, be sure to check out the full blog post over on the Linux Mint website.