For all you "Minters" out there, Mint 19 beta available for testing on Monday

[fox]

The announcement is here. Lots of you are running Mint, so start your engines and try out the new version.

Mint 19 interests me in particular because it will ship with the 4.15 kernel, which boots right up on my 5k iMac (at least it does in Ubuntu 18.04). The 4.8 kernel from Mint 18 also worked well on this computer and as a result, I switched to Mint (cinnamon) and have been using it exclusively until Ubuntu 18.04 was released. Now I am using the two interchangeably, and am waiting to see how Mint 19 performs before deciding which will be my main distro.

[Jason]

Probably be the first time I won't be upgrading to a new LM release since the KDE edition has been dropped in 19. I might try it on the laptop to see if you can add KDE to it and not break anything but I'll wait for the stable version before doing that.

[dougal]

thanks for the heads-up Mike, I've been waiting for the new release to 'get stuck into' LM ....just loaded a pc at the Restore with LM 18.3 to replace the MS os that everyone was complaining about and folks seem to think it's great...mostly because it's so much faster to boot....one step at a time

[Jason]

Was it one of your work computers, Dougal? Or was it a donated computer that you're planning on selling?

[fox]

Well good news for you, Dougal. The Linux Mint 19 beta was released to the public on Monday, with the final edition due out at the end of the month. I just tried out the cinnamon version, and it's very nice. (Most important for me is that with the 4.15 kernel, it boots up quickly on my finicky 5k iMac!) It has some new features that most people (except Jason because there is no longer an officially supported KDE edition) will like. If you go to youtube and search for Linux Mint 19, you'll find a few nice reviews that include the new features.

I'm now waiting on the final release, at which time I'm going to try upgrading my 18.3 installation. It looks like I will now have a tough decision to make - Mint 19 or Ubuntu 18.04 as my main distro.

[dougal]

Jason...it was the work computer we have in the test area... it's used for looking up manuals , specs, etc for things that get donated...very easy tasks and very few operators....connecting to the LAN wifi was  probably the greatest concern...btw , we   remove any storage (hdd) on computers to protect donator's privacy after testing the unit for functionality...the challenge we may run into soon is receiving donations that utilize DDR3 RAM as our supply cache has only DDR2.

[fox]

Probably be the first time I won't be upgrading to a new LM release since the KDE edition has been dropped in 19. I might try it on the laptop to see if you can add KDE to it and not break anything but I'll wait for the stable version before doing that.

Looks like you can run KDE on Mint 19, at least according to this youtube video.

[Jason]

Thanks. I think I used this technique to add KDE to LM 18.3 Cinnamon but it turned out really buggy. The KDE desktop kept freezing. But maybe something else was going on (like a driver issue). I'll try on my laptop and see how it goes before I considering moving my desktop to it.