Monthly News – August 2020

Before we start with the news, I’d like to thank you for your donations and for your help. Many thanks to everyone involved in supporting us.

Backports and fixes

Many bug fixes were backported to Linux Mint 19.3. Three of them are quite significant:

cinnamon-session: Don’t let unresponsive programs delay the shutdown.
muffin: Fixed crash with certain Steam games in fullscreen.
muffin: Fixed black glitches and random desktop artefacts.

Bug fixes were also applied specifically to Linux Mint 20 and LMDE 4 to address a case which made the desktop crash as well as cosmetic issues, keybinding issues.

Warpinator received updates to improve network connectivity and preservation of file permissions.

Libxapp received updates to make its SNI watcher asynchronous. This fixed missing tray icons with some QT, Electron and Chromium applications and in some cases also login issues.

Warpinator

We’re happy to announce that Warpinator, the network transfer tool which shipped with Linux Mint 20 and was ported to LMDE 4, is now available to all users of Linux as a Flatpak.

If you are using Linux Mint 19.x or Linux Mint 18.x open the Software Manager and search for “Warpinator”.

If you are using a different Linux distribution head over to Flathub at https://flathub.org/apps/details/org.x.Warpinator.

If you want to share files between computers running different releases of Linux Mint or different distributions, note that you can use both Flatpak and non-Flatpak versions of Warpinator on the same network.

WebApp Manager

Are you often struggling to find a particular website among the many browser windows and tabs already opened? Do you wish you could easily just launch your favorite websites and have them run in their own window as if they were desktop applications?

If so, Peppermint has the solution. They have a tool called “ICE” which is dedicated to turning your favorite websites into standalone applications. In fact, they’ve had that solution for a while since ICE was initially developed in 2010!

Fast forward 10 years and we’re planning to solve the same problem. We’re a little bit late to the party but we’re excited to bring our contribution. We started talks with Peppermint and we’re currently trying to figure out the best way to work together.

We started a project called Web App Manager which features:

A new icon and generic name
A new user interface
100% back and forth compatibility with ICE
A split backend to make it easy for ICE and Web App manager to use the same codebase if they both want to retain separate UIs.
The ability to edit Web applications
Icon theme support with icons automatically guessed for popular websites
Improved favicon downloads (including support for favicongrabber.com)
The ability to show or hide the Firefox navigation bar
Full translation support for all major languages (at the time of release)