The MATE edition has also been released today

Nov 18, 2015 18:00 GMT  ·  By

Just a few moments ago, the Linux Mint developers announced the official release and immediate availability for download of the Beta builds of Linux Mint 17.3 "Rosa" Cinnamon and MATE editions.

We were first to report yesterday the availability of the Linux Mint 17.3 "Rosa" Cinnamon Edition Beta and Linux Mint 17.3 "Rosa" MATE Edition Beta GNU/Linux operating systems, for which we've created in-depth screenshot tours.

A day later, Clement Lefebvre, the leader of the Linux Mint project, had the pleasure of making an official announcement, which includes some interesting details about the features that have been implemented in the upcoming distributions.

"Linux Mint 17.3 is a long term support release which will be supported until 2019. It comes with updated software and brings refinements and many new features to make your desktop even more comfortable to use," said Clement Lefebvre.

What's new in Linux Mint 17.3 "Rosa" Cinnamon Edition

Highlights of the Linux Mint 17.3 "Rosa" Cinnamon Edition operating system include the latest stable Cinnamon 2.8 desktop environment, full UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) support, and better support for NVIDIA GeForce GPUs.

Based on Ubuntu 14.04.3 LTS (Trusty Tahr), Linux Mint 17.3 (Rosa) will be powered by Linux kernel 3.19, which is supported by Canonical until Ubuntu 14.04 LTS reaches end of life on April 2019. Therefore, Linux Mint 17.3 will also be supported until 2019.

Users of the Linux Mint 17, Linux Mint 17.1 and Linux Mint 17.2 operating systems will be able to upgrade to Linux Mint 17.3 once the final release will be published on the project's website, sometime next month.

In the meantime, you can download Linux Mint 17.3 "Rosa" Cinnamon Edition right now from Softpedia and start testing it. As usual, we don't recommend users to install this pre-release version on production machines. More details about this Beta version of Linux Mint 17.3 can be found in the official release notes.