Linux Mint Debian Edition 3 Is On The Way, Cinnamon 4.0 Working On Speed

The Linux Mint team has shared a routine status update about the work they have been engaged in over the past month, including dealing with some nasty package updates and readying the beta of Linux Mint Debian Edition 3 (LMDE 3).

This month they had to deal with some headaches causing issues stemming from Ubuntu stable release updates around Mesa and GRUB in particular. There's also been a kernel problem to deal with, among other regressions. But for those that are fans of Linux Mint Debian Edition whereby the distribution uses a Debian based over Ubuntu LTS, the LMDE 3 release is on the way. The developers believe the LMDE 3 Beta should surface by the end of July. Additionally, they plan to ship LMDE 3 both with their own live installer as well as a Calamares-based installer option.

While Cinnamon 3.8 was just recently released ahead of Linux Mint 19, they are already working on Cinnamon 4.0. One of the areas they are focusing on for Cinnamon 4.0 is better performance, in particular, around possibly turning off vblank. Disabling vblank for the desktop compositor can often deliver much better performance but at a possible cost of screen-tearing. At least with the NVIDIA proprietary graphics driver, the compositor vblank'ing can be disabled while having no tearing if enabling NVIDIA's force composition pipeline option. The Linux Mint developers are testing out various GPU/driver options to determine what can be done about vblank performance for Cinnamon 4.0.

More details on the Linux Mint efforts via the LinuxMint.com blog.