The KDE Edition is the last in the new Linux Mint 18.1 “Serena” stable series to be published, and it was delayed a little bit because Clement Lefebvre and his team wanted it to ship with latest KDE Plasma 5.8 LTS desktop environment from the Kubuntu Backports PPA repository. Just like all the other official flavors from the Linux Mint 18 “Sarah” and Linux Mint 18.1 “Serena” series, the KDE Edition is based on Canonical’s Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) operating system, using the long-term supported Linux 4.4 kernel. This Beta release also ships with linux-firmware 1.157.5 and numerous other updated components.