I noticed activity in the packages of Linux Mint Debian Edition 7 on the servers of Linux Mint. It means that we are close to a release of Linux Mint “Zena” and an upgrade to LMDE 7. The most important updates are a renewed menu, a “System Reports” tool to help finding problems and recommended solutions to issues, the adddition of XApp Symbolic Icons (XSI), which are simple, monochrome icons used throughout applications for buttons, menus, and status indicators. Furthermore, cinnamon has been upgraded to 6.6, with improved support for keyboard layouts and input methods. Nemo has been upgraded to 6.6 which features a template manager. Furthermore, in Nemo one can pause and resume file operations from now on. Other improvments: whenever you miss a notification, it now shows a badge in your window list. The workspace switcher applet was improved. Its desktop representation is much clearer than before. Only visible windows are shown, along with their icon. A new configuration tool was implemented to support Thunderbolt. Many more features were added. It can all be seen here.
I will start working on the updates to the arm64 version of LMDE 7. For current users, these updates will become available via the MintPPC repository. In the near future, I will also spin a new LMDE 7 iso with the upgraded packages. If all is done, I will publish it here on the homepage.