Many thanks also for your donations and for your support. With the money collected during the past few months we were able to send big bonuses to our developers and to our moderators. This always feels really good, especially around Christmas.

At the moment there are 34 issues open. Most of them aren’t release blockers but there still are bugs we want to fix prior to giving Linux Mint 20.1 a stable release.

I know it’s been asked a few times but I can’t give you an exact release date. It’s not that we don’t want to tell you, it’s simply that we don’t know exactly when the release will happen. Until it’s ready it won’t happen, and once it’s ready there’s no reason to wait for an announced date.

As a project, if we wanted to announce a release date and stick to it we would have to deliberately plan it further than anticipated, be ready to make people work late at night even where there are no real emergencies or worse, release the product with important bugs we could have fixed but didn’t have time to. I know some companies and some projects work like that and that’s OK. I know the visibility they give their user base is important and appreciated as well, but that’s not how we chose to operate. The release comes out when we’re happy with it. Looking at the list of bugs we have, there still are issues we want to fix. In 2 months time it won’t matter at all whether we released this a week earlier or a week later, but the bugs we let through, especially those which affect the live session, will mark the release forever and be on the forefront of the version people download for the next 6 months.

So we do not have set release dates. We do however have a 6 months release cycle which gives us rhythm and a sense of urgency and getting this release out right now is all we’re focused on.