New features in Linux Mint 16 MATE - Linux Mint

Linux Mint 16 is the result of 6 months of incremental development on top of stable and reliable technologies. This new release comes with updated software and brings refinements and new features to make your desktop even more comfortable to use.

Login Screen

MDM 1.4 was designed to work perfectly with Linux Mint 16, not only to log in but also to let you switch between users easily.

MDM received the following improvements:

• Drastic speed improvements and an easier codebase to facilitate maintenance, bug fixing and innovation (niche features and some 24,500 lines of code were removed)
• A streamlined user interface which focuses on important features
• The ability for the last logged-in user to simply log in by entering his/her password
• Num-Lock support

• New theme techniques were also implemented and featured in the default theme. The animated background and the user selection will inspire other artists to create a new generation of MDM themes.

  LightDM (which was a popular alternative to MDM 1.2 in Linux Mint 15) was also improved. Unity-greeter was adapted to properly integrate with Linux Mint 16.

  USB Stick support

  A new tool was developed to easily format USB sticks to NTFS, FAT32 and ext4.

  Performance improvements

  Linux Mint 16 focuses on the task at hand, it does less and does it better than before. It features many speed and performance improvements:

  • The boot and login sequence no longer scan your system for btrfs partitions.
  • The MDM display manager no longer listens or communicates over the network.
  • The Update Manager is now started with a delay to make it faster for the session to load.
  • The Software Manager features significant speed improvements.
  • The Linux Mint 16 ISO images are not as compressed as before. They take more space and are bigger to download but also easier on the system and faster to decompress during the live session.

  Software Manager

  The Software Manager received many bug fixes and performance improvements. It's faster to start, faster to search, and uses less memory than before.

  Its interface was also refined and applications can now show multiple screenshots.

  System improvements

  Under the hood, Linux Mint 16 introduces a lot of improvements:

  • Safer kernel updates.
  • Faster boot sequence and faster login.
  • Better EFI support.
  • Better support for Steam and its addition in the repositories and the featured section of the Software Manager.
  • Additional private/secure search engines in certain countries.
  • APT "recommends" disabled by default.
  • Better colors in terminal and the addition of "ll" as an alias to "ls -al".
  • Better help support.

  Artwork improvements

  Linux Mint 16 features a superb collection of gradient backgrounds from Rapciu, photographs from Arturo Donate, Bob Jagendorf and Kenny Louie as well as artwork from Omer Kavak.

  The new Mint-X theme brings:

  • Better support for GTK3 and a more consistent look between GTK2 and GTK3 applications
  • Polished anti-aliased window borders
  • New icons for several Mint tools and popular 3rd party applications (Handbrake, Tomahawk..etc)

  Main components

  Linux Mint 16 features MATE 1.6, MDM 1.4, a Linux kernel 3.11 and an Ubuntu 13.10 package base.