Linux Mint project leader Clement Lefebvre recently announced the immediate availability of Beta versions of the upcoming Xfce and KDE editions of the Linux Mint 18.2 “Sonya” operating system.
In this article, we are going to take a look at Linux Mint 18.2 "Sonya" KDE Beta Edition, which comes with the KDE Plasma 5.8 desktop environment (with long-term support or LTS) by default thanks to the collaboration with the Kubuntu team, as announced by Clement Lefebvre himself earlier this year.
The Linux Mint 18.2 “Sonya” operating system is about to launch soon, but is currently in the Beta development stages. For now the editions are available Cinnamon, MATE, KDE and Xfce for public testing, and all these versions are based on Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system and they arrive with him Linux Kernel 4.8.
"Linux Mint 18.2 is a version with extended support until the year 2021. It brings updated software and provides improvements and many new functions to make your desktop experience more comfortable," stated Clement Lefebvre in today's announcement.
The Update Manager and Software Sources received several improvements
Aside from shipping with the KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS desktop environment by default, the Linux Mint 18.2 "Sonya" KDE Beta edition comes with a few improved versions of Update Manager and Software Sources, the same tools that also ship with the Cinnamon and MATE editions, which we talked about last week.
In this edition of Linux Mint 18.2 "Sonya" there is no no XApps package, and it seems that the disc burning tool Brasero is no longer installed by default. Among other changes we can mention that the root account is now locked by default, so you must use the command "sudo -i" in addition to entering your password to become root.
On the other hand, the APT package manager also received support for the "markauto" and "markmanual" commands, which allows you to mark those packages to be installed automatically or manually, respectively. Also, the package is installed linux-firmware 1.157.10 for better hardware support.
You can download Linux Mint 18.2 “Sonya” KDE Beta Edition as a Live ISO image of 32 or 64 bit if you want to try it, but keep in mind that it is a pre-release version that should not be installed on production machines.
Greetings, I am a long time user of Mint, now I have Mint 18 Serena Mate 64 bits and I have tested the beta of Linux Mint 18.2 “Sonya” KDE 64 bits. My experience could not be better, I wanted to leave it installed but being beta I prefer to wait; I don't know too much about linux either and if something doesn't work and nobody tells me how to fix it, bad
I mean that so far Mate has been my favorite by far (a matter of taste, you know) but I liked this KDE a lot, so much so that it will probably be the one to install.
Nothing more, greetings to all and congratulations for the blog so interesting.