Thanks to a news tip from one of our regular readers, it would appear that the Beta release of the upcoming Linux Mint 18 "Sarah" KDE Edition operating system is now available for download.
Curious to see the work done by the Linux Mint team and community in modernizing the KDE edition of the popular GNU/Linux operating system, we grabbed the 64-bit Live ISO image to get an early taste. To our surprise, the distro looks gorgeous, with a dark theme that dresses both the bottom panel and Applications Menu.
As expected, Linux Mint 18 "Sarah" KDE Edition is based on the latest Kubuntu/Ubuntu technologies, which means that the distribution is powered by the long-term supported Linux 4.4 kernel, and uses the KDE Applications 15.12.3 software suite on top of the KDE Plasma 5.6.5 desktop environment.
Besides various popular KDE apps like Dolphin, Kontact, digiKam, Gwenview, Skanlite, KTorrent, KMail, Konversation, Amarok, K3b, Konsole, Ark, Kate, Okular, and Dragon Player, Linux Mint 18 "Sarah" KDE Edition also ships with the Mozilla Firefox and LibreOffice as default web browser and office suite.
Linux Mint 18 "Sarah" KDE Edition arrives next month
Linux Mint 18 "Sarah" KDE Edition Beta is just a preview of what's coming to the final release of the highly anticipated GNU/Linux distribution, which should see the light of day sometime in the first week of September. However, until then, the Linux Mint developers have some more bugs to patch and features to add.
Therefore, they need your help to test the Beta release and report issues. We've just updated our database of free software and you can now download the 64-bit or 32-bit Live ISO images of Linux Mint 18 "Sarah" KDE Edition Beta. When testing, please try to keep in mind that this is a pre-release version, not yet ready for production use.
