The wider Ubuntu ecosystem
Besides the official flavours, Ubuntu provides the basis for a number of popular derivative distributions, many of which will be releasing updates soon. The most popular is Linux Mint, and we look forward very much to Mint 19, which hopefully will be released in June. We were nothing but impressed with Mint 18 (see LXF214), where we saw Mint start to move away from Gnome applications, launching its own desktop-agnostic X-apps. The goal here is to avoid the new GTK3 stylings, most notably headerbars, which broke from tradition.
The rather beautiful ElementaryOS will be getting a version bump from 0.4 to 5.0, hopefully in the not-too-distant future. Apart from confounding our ideas about how versioning should work, this reflects elementary’s growing maturity and stability. Like Mint, the team are working on the next generation of their applications, which are all written in Vala and, unlike Mint, embrace modern design paradigms – headerbars and all. The old text editor, Scratch, has grown up into a code editor, Code, which we’re particularly excited about.
If you want to test the very latest KDE technologies, the best way is probably through KDE Neon. This is not a distro in the conventional sense, because it only includes shiny new KDE software. This led to a slight oddity when one considered the vintage of the kernel and repositories from the 16.04 LTS (the idea is to have a stable base underneath all the Plasma bits). However, this will be remedied, at least temporarily, when it’s rebased to 18.04.