The Linux Mint team announces that they are now including Chromium in the Mint repo. And also a new IPTV Player in user demands.
Ubuntu started shipping Chromium as a snap package a while back. Not many people like snap due to its performance issues among other things. As the Linux Mint based on Ubuntu, force inclusion of the snap version of Chromium is not perceived well by its users.
Chromium
Hence, the Linux Mint team removed Snap completely, like Pop OS. They even disabled the snap installation.
Listening to the users, and the popularity of base Chromium, the Linux Mint team compiled the entire Chromium project separately. And packaged it only for Linux Mint users.
The package is available Linux Mint repository as “chromium” which you can install using standard “apt-get” or via the package manager. This is pure native Chromium and not a snap version.
Now, the Debian repo still has a native Chromium build in its repo, but it’s not the upstream Chromium version. Debian as usual takes things slow for stability. The current Chromium version is 88.x and the Debian Buster repo has 83.x. Hence Mint team decided not to follow the Debian package instead recompile from the source.
Hypnotix – An IPTV Player
Also, a new IPTV Player announced – “Hypnotix”. Linux Mint developing Hypnotix based on user feedback and demands. This utility is not ready yet. A prototype is built and it’s ALPHA stage right now. So bugs, features are still being worked on.
The IPTV player comes pre-configured with FreeIPTV. FreeIPTV is a free content provider that streams a variety of TV stations. The utility still under development. Only English translation is present at the moment.
The user interface sill being worked on and does not have any option to change the content provider at the moment. If you install this, however, you can add a custom content provider URI using settings as below via the command line.
gsettings set org.x.hypnotix providers "['Provider_Name:::https://m3u_url.m3u']"
You can follow its development in Github.
Also, a new feature “Add to favorites” for files/folders is added in the context menu. You can now use this to bookmark any file, folder. Once you do that, it can be accessed via the file manager, file selection dialog very easily.
All these features are expected to be added to the upcoming Linux Mint 20.1 schedule for December 2020. However, the chromium is now available in the repo which you can install right now via Mint package manager.
Image credits: Mint blog.
