What's new in Linux Mint 4.0 Beta 1 (Daryna)

As my previous post about Linux Mint 4.0 code name Daryna, now I continue to give more infos about "her":

The new thing you can see in Linux Mint 4.0 are:

1. mintUpdate

With mintUpdate you can now get automatic updates without compromising the stability of your system. Updates are assigned a security level which indicates how safe they are for you to apply. MintUpdate also brings you more information about the updates and the risks involved in applying them.



MintUpdate is also highly configurable and you decide which levels you want to see and which you want selected by default.



The implementation of mintUpdate in Daryna follows the decision to remove the Ubuntu Update Manager in Celena because it didn't give enough information about updates and assumed all updates were without risk for the user's system.

2. mintInstall & the Software Portal

MintInstall and the Software Portal were already available in Cassandra and Celena. Even though they were better alternatives than Click'n'Run, APTURL, PBIDir or the new SUSE initiative they failed to be noticed both by the press and by our own community. We asked ourselves why and came to the conclusion that there presence had not been made obvious enough. In Daryna, you can now interact with mintInstall without starting from the Portal. A link was added directly in the menu:



And a new frontend to mintInstall now allows you to search the portal directly from your desktop:



mintInstall itself was also made more intuitive and improvements were made to its interface.

In the backend, mintInstall now also relies on Synaptic and brings improvements on how it handles downloads/installations of packages and hotplugging of repositories.

3. mintDesktop improvements

mintDesktop got major improvements in terms of usability and now has an extra-feature which lets you restore the default splash-screens coming with Linux Mint for OpenOffice, Gimp and Amarok:



4. Compiz Fusion

Credits go to Xorg, Compiz Fusion and Ubuntu here for bringing us the best 3D effects available and activated out of the box in Daryna. We know how much you like these technologies so we also included the Compiz Fusion Setting Manager:





Note: The Restricted Manager was improved and should be able to bring 3D support to all nVidia cards. Envy is being developed at the moment to include the new ATI drivers released by AMD and will be included in the next BETA or in the stable release of Daryna.

Source: Linux Mint