Linux Mint 19.x 'Tara' to release in mid 2018

The upcoming version of Linux Mint, the popular Linux distro, will be codenamed 'Tara' according to the developers. This means, all versions in the 19.x branch will have codenames starting with 'T'. Development has just commenced on the next version, which will start from version 19.x. 'Tara' will be based on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS and supported for five years till 2023.

It is interesting to see that Mint 19.x will use GTK 3.22 for theming. GTK (GIMP Toolkit) is a cross-platform toolkit for creating GUI applications. GTK 3.22 is already being used in the Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) 3 and the developers state this will be the GUI theming engine going forward. KDE will no longer be offered as an option in the ISO. Users are, however, free to download and use KDE on Linux Mint independently if they wish to.

Linux Mint 19.x will be mostly under-the-hood changes as the team feels the previous version already had a lot of features built in. The underlying technologies implemented in Mint 19.x will be the basis for further development and the GTK 3.22 support will ensure developers can use apps developed using Mint components on other distros like Fedora and Arch without much trouble.

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