Linux Mint may slow down releases to have more development time

Along with receiving an unprecedented amount of donations recently, the Linux Mint team are looking at slowing down their release cycle.

In a fresh blog post from founder Clem Lefebvre, they note how December saw donations from over a thousand people which is the most they've ever seen. Nice to see the project so alive and well, as overall Linux Mint is a great no-fuss distribution.

There's more to go over - but starting with the big bit, they're likely to slow down their release schedule. Why? As Lefebvre said "With a release every six months plus LMDE, we spend more time testing, fixing, and releasing than developing" so they're currently thinking on "changing that and adopting a longer development cycle". It does make sense, six months is a pretty rapid release schedule, especially for a distribution that doesn't have the vast resources of Canonical or Red Hat.

Pictured - Linux Mint

In other Mint news their team are also working on adding user administration and account details into their Administration Tool (mintsysadm). Additionally, they're also planning to implement a completely new screensaver for the next Linux Mint release, since the current one only works in X11. And since everyone is moving over to Wayland, they need it to work fully. With the newer one they plan to have it working with both X11 and Wayland, be rendered natively by Cinnamon's window manager and as a result be better integrated and give a smoother transition for users during screen locking. They said this is actually the last piece of the puzzle for Cinnamon to have full Wayland support.

On top of that they're also working on adding support for keyboard layouts that don't match the physical keyboard.