Linux Mint Monthly News – February 2021

An announcement was made last week to explain why security updates are important and to remind people to update their computer. If you haven’t read it yet please visit https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=4030. We started working on improvements for the Update Manager. In the next release the manager won’t just look for available updates, it will also keep track of particular metrics and be able to detect cases where updates are overlooked. Some of these metrics are when was the last time updates were applied, when was the last time packages were upgraded on the system, for how many days has a particular update been shown… In some cases the Update Manager will be able to remind you to apply updates. In a few of them it might even insist. We don’t want it to be dumb and get in your way though. It’s here to help. If you are handling things your way, it will detect smart patterns and usages. It will also be configurable and let you change the way it’s set up. We have key principles at Linux Mint. One of them is that this is your computer, not ours. We also have many use cases in mind and don’t want to make Linux Mint harder to use for any of them. We’re still forming strategies and deciding when and how the manager should make itself more visible so it’s too soon to speak about these aspects and get into the details which probably interest you the most here. So far we worked on making the manager smarter and giving it more information and more metrics to look at.

Edit video on Linux with this Python app

In 2021, there are more reasons why people love Linux than ever before. In this series, I'll share 21 different reasons to use Linux. Here's how I use Linux to edit videos. Back in 2018, I wrote an article about the state of Linux video editing, in which I chose an application called Openshot as my pick for the top hobbyist video editing software. Years later, and my choices haven't changed. Openshot remains a great little video editing application for Linux, and it's managed to make creating videos on Linux boring in the best of ways. Also: Ventoy 1.0.36 - Neowin

Shipping Debian with GNOME X.XX.0 is an extremely bad idea

Since the freeze has slowly crept in, now is the time to revisit my pet peeve with Debian's release process: to publish a new Debian release as soon as GNOME published a new X.XX.0 version. This is an extremely bad idea: X.XX.0 releases tend to lack polish, their translations are not up-to-date and several silly bugs that hamper the user experience (what the Ubuntu guys call "paper cuts") exist.