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Linux Mint is one of the surprise packages of the past year. Originally launched as a variant of Ubuntu with integrated media codecs, it has now developed into one of the most user-friendly distributions on the market - complete with a custom desktop and menus, several unique configuration tools, a web-based package installation interface, and a number of different editions. Perhaps most importantly, this is one project where the developers and users are in constant interaction, resulting in dramatic, user-driven improvements with every new release. DistroWatch has spoken to the founder and lead developer of Linux Mint, Clement Lefebvre, about the history of the distribution. Linux Mint 17.3 is a long term support release which will be supported until 2019. It comes with updated software and brings refinements and many new features to make your desktop even more comfortable to use.

Software Sources
Software repositories are very important. We use them all the time when installing new software or performing updates. They need to be fast and reliable. This was a major point of focus in the development of Linux Mint 17.3.

Update Manager
The Update Manager now also performs more checks than before.

Driver Manager
The Driver Manager is more robust than before. It refreshes the cache before looking for drivers and reports update and installation errors if appropriate. Drivers are now sorted by status and the Driver Manager now indicates if drivers are Open Source or not.

Cinnamon 2.8
Linux Mint 17.3 features Cinnamon 2.8.

Better applets
Sound applet
The sound applet was given a fresh new layout. The track information and media controls are now part of a new overlay which sits on top of the cover art.

Visual improvements
The traditional animation effect for minimizing windows was fixed and it is now working with multiple panels. Some polish and slight visual improvements were applied to both the classic and preview Alt-Tab application switchers. Box pointers (the little arrows joining applet menus to the panel) received some attention and now look much better than before when close to the edge of the screen.

Better window management
Support for multiple monitors was significantly improved. The mapping of new windows, dialogs, OSD info (such as the workspace names) was reviewed to make sure everything appeared in the right place and on the appropriate monitor. Improvements related to frame synchronization which were implemented in Mutter (the GNOME Shell window manager) in cooperation with NVIDIA were ported to Muffin (the Cinnamon window manager). These changes should fix rendering issues with NVIDIA cards but could also have a positive impacts on ATI and Intel chipsets.

Performance improvements
The calendar applet used to wake up the CPU every second even if seconds weren’t shown. This was fixed and further reduces idle CPU usage.

The absence of disk cache was identified as the reason why the first Cinnamon session after a shutdown/reboot was significantly slower to load than any subsequent session. To tackle this issue, Cinnamon 2.6 introduced “preloading”, which goal was to initialize parts of Cinnamon in the background, while you were busy typing your password at the login screen. Thanks to your feedback and testing done on a wider variety of hardware, “preloading” was reviewed in Cinnamon 2.8. Although it helped in reducing the most costly steps involved in the initialization of a Cinnamon session, the gains were unfortunately marginal. Preloading also proved to slow down the startup sequence, and in particular the loading of the login screen. It was therefore removed from Cinnamon 2.8.