Linux Mint 18.2 “Sonya” is expected to land sometime this month, already later than the expected May release. Mint team leader Clement Lefebvre has announced that it is just around the corner with the Cinnamon and MATE edition currently undergoing functional testing. He also said that we should expect a beta release to land early this month.

We’ve got some details on the new update with regards to the desktop environments. Cinnamon has been upgraded to version 3.4 and MATE has been bumped to version 1.18. LightDM will be adopted as the login manager; out of the box it supports guest sessions and should look pretty stylish, at least according to Lefebvre.

The update will bring improvements to Linux Mint’s homegrown applications as well as third-party system software; some of the apps include Blueberry, Xed, Xplayer, Xreader, Pix, Xviewer, the Update Manager, and the Software Source configuration tool.

Clem also commented on the state of donation to the Linux Mint project:

“Last month I mentioned that donations weren't as high as last year. We’ve seen a fantastic response since and it was clearly visible this month. We’ll report the May donations in the June monthly stats of course, but since the month of May has ended I can already communicate figures. We’ve received more than $16,000, which is more than twice as much as the figure for May last year. We usually see more donations “after” a release, not before. The number of people who donated in May is also quite impressive.. it’s very humbling to imagine 647 people assembled together, here just to support our work. I hope we won’t disappoint and you’ll get to love this new release as much as the previous ones.”

Linux Mint 18.2 will be available through the Update Manager menus if you’re on Linux Mint 18.1 or 18.0. If you don’t want to update your system to 18.2, that’s fine, all older releases of Linux Mint 18 will continue to be updated with security patches until 2021.