Written by Linux Mint Founder and Lead Developer Clement Lefebvre has announced that the upcoming release of Linux Mint will be of the GNOME 3 edition. The Open Source GNU/Linux distro Linux Mint 12 to be due out in November will continue supporting for GNOME 2.32 meanwhile remaining as default desktop environment of Mint.
On a blog post in Mint’s official website, Lefebvre announced that they have started working on GNOME 3 edition of Linux Mint 12, and they will use the recent stable GNOME 3 desktop environment which is GNOME 3.2. He further quoted the potential of the new desktop and use it to implement something that can look and behave better than anything based on GNOME 2.
Lefebvre said that “radical changes” introduced by GNOME Project has split the community of Gnome users, so developers will still continue to work on GNOME 2.32 as its default desktop alongside GNOME 3. Linux Mint 12 is codenamed “Lisa” and will be based on the Ubuntu 11.10 “Oneiric Ocelot”. Mint is working in cooperation with the MATE project for reviving GNOME 2.x on its systems, either in Linux Mint 12, or for future releases.
Clement Lefebvre had already clarified, in an interview to Muktware that their Ubuntu based distribution will not switch to Unity in future releases, instead remain as similar as it is at the moment. Earlier version of Mint was an un-unity release. Unity and GNOME Shell was available as optional installation.
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In Linux Mint 12, “MGSE” (Mint Gnome Shell Extensions) will be introduced keeping in mind the usability of Gnome 3 in a traditional way. MGSE includes bottom panel, application menu, windows lists, a task-centric desktop, visible system tray icons and several additional extensions such as a media player indicator, and multiple enhancements to GNOME 3. If you want a pure GNOME 3 experience, you can disable all the components and enjoy GNOME 3 singly.
With a view to give users a good search experience, Mint is no more using custom search engines (which was used with Google Adsense enabled search for funds). From upcoming releases, Mint will provide users with the following commercial search engines: Ask.com, Google, Amazon, eBay, and the non-commercial Wikipedia.
Distrowatch.com has shown Linux Mint as the second most popular Linux distribution after Ubuntu. Linux Mint aims at providing a simple user-friendly system with out-of-the-box experience (including loads of support for DVD playbacks, multimedia codecs, Java support and various plugins). And with a plus from Ubuntu users dissatisfied from Unity Interface, Will Linux Mint place the most popular Linux distribution chart?