And the good news starts with the fact that the wait is almost over for the Linux Mint 18.1 “Serena” Cinnamon and MATE editions, which should hit the streets by the end of the week, but not before the upgrade path from the previous release, Linux Mint 18 “Sarah,” is in place and ready to take users to the next major version of the popular GNU/Linux distribution. If you’re reading our daily reports, you should know that Linux Mint 18.1 “Serena” is based on the latest Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system and powered by the long-term supported Linux 4.4 kernel series. It’s also shipping with the recently released Cinnamon 3.2 desktop environment for the Cinnamon Edition, and MATE 1.16 for the MATE flavor. Also, Linux Mint 18.1 KDE is coming soon with KDE Plasma 5.8 by default.