Linux Mint 12

Linux Mint's purpose is to produce an elegant, up to date and comfortable GNU/Linux desktop distribution.

Is Linux Mint suitable for companies?

Yes. Linux Mint offers paid commercial support to companies and individuals. Free community support is also available from the forums and the IRC channel. The main purpose of Linux Mint is to innovate and constantly bring the best desktop solutions to its users. For this reason, the release cycle is fast and a new version of Linux Mint can be released every month or every two months. All released versions of Linux Mint are actively supported and some of the releases (possibly Bianca or Cassandra) will come with a Long Term Support guarantee (a guarantee that our Support Center will support these releases for the years to come).

Is Linux Mint suitable for individuals?

Yes, definitely. We believe Linux is the best operating system on the market. There are more than 300 active Linux distributions and we're working hard at becoming the best alternative for your desktop. This is a tough competition as there are other great desktop operating systems and distributions out there. We have faith in the quality of our desktop and a lot of great ideas. If your computer is a PC and you have more than 512MB RAM you should try Linux Mint and see what you think about it. If you're running a 5 years old non-free operating system such as Microsoft Windows XP you should definitely be impressed. We like hearing about your experience and taking your suggestions onboard so please give us your feedback.

Why is there a Light Edition and a Full Edition?

Linux Mint respects the GPL and it also respects the copyrights and licenses of the proprietary software it distributes. However it uses technologies that have been patented in some parts of the World. Most countries do not recognize the legitimacy of software patents so for most of our users this is not a problem. But if you're unlucky and you live in a country where software patents are legally enforcable, you need a version of Linux Mint which is free of patented technologies, and this is what the Light Edition is about.

Why does Linux Mint include proprietary drivers?

It doesn't. If it did, it would be legally wrong (because it would violate the GPL) or ethically wrong (if some dirty trick was used for the user to link the code to the kernel for instance).

What about proprietary software?

We believe in open source and release all our work with the corresponding source code. We owe a lot to the Free Software movement and to the GPL but we also owe a lot to all the developers who contributed ideas and tools and who made software better and better throughout the years. Some of them released their source code as well and thus granted us more freedom and more flexibility. Others released their software with proprietary licenses and although this didn't give us the freedom we would have liked it still contributed to make software better. We like Software in general, Free Software even more, but we do not believe in boycotting Proprietary Software.

What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]

· One click install for multimedia codecs and extra applications

The Software Manager:

· UI improvements
· New splash screen
· Fonts category
· More accurate package information
· More application icons by default
· More accurate search by default

The Update Manager:

· Performance boosts
· Improved dependencies handling
· Better changelog retrieval
· UI improvements

The Desktop Settings tool:

· “Desktop-agnostic”, detection and upcoming compatibility with other desktops
· New setting for the fortunes in the terminal

Artwork improvements:

· Backgrounds, overlay scrollbars, plymouth, Mint-X, search add-on.

System improvements:

· new “apt download” command
· Adobe flash plugins

· Changes in the software selection