Instead of focusing on speeding up the release of the Ubuntu 26.04-based Linux Mint 23, which currently has an ETA for Christmas and will certainly be a pack of bugs, Clement Lefebvre has “d’autres chats à fouetter.”

If Linux Mint 22.3 is as buggy as LMDE 7, then it cannot be installed on a system with 2 SSDs if one SSD hosts the home partition and the other is dedicated to the other partitions. I tried installing LMDE 7 twice on such a laptop, and both times it failed to add GRUB to either SSD. But hey, Clem is more interested in his bling-bling toys.

The last symptom of his insanity is that his project now includes a showcase (how do you say “une vitrine” in English?) of those bloody XApps: XApp — Apps that work everywhere. Of course, XApp is the plural of… XApp. We have apps, packages, Flatpaks, snaps, and whatnot, but “one XApp, several XApp.” Clem is also revolutionizing linguistics.

The showcase site groups the XApps in two categories.

Applications:

  • Clockenstein — a new thing! Potentially useful, with limitations.
  • Xed — old news. A fork of Pluma to serve as a unique text editor across Cinnamon, XFCE, and MATE.
  • Xreader — old news. A fork of Atril.
  • Xepub — another new thing! In a world where so many ePub readers are buggy as hell, Xepub was written from scratch in Python and GTK3. Just like Foliate, it uses WebKitGTK.
  • Thingy — never heard of it, but Clem says it used to be called Library before this redesign. Still doesn’t ring a bell. Organizing documents by type and grouping them as desired. Well, I have 35,000 ePub files on this filesystem; can Thingy handle them?
  • Sticky — old news, and useless at that.
  • Hypnotix — a Mint classic that mostly misbehaved when I last tried it.
  • Pix — a useless duplicate of XViewer, apparently. Let’s just add bugs to the Mint ecosystem! Sorry, I meant apps.
  • Xviewer — a classic. Apparently, a fork of Eye of GNOME, not of Eye of MATE. I wonder why.

Tools:

  • Bulky — very useful, but unless you build it from source (because otherwise the LMDE7 package can be used under Debian 13), it will lack some icons.
  • Fingwit — not needed by 99.8% of Linux users who don’t log in using a fingerprint reader.
  • Online Accounts — “A GTK Frontend for GNOME Online Accounts.” Screw it.
  • Timeshift — another classic. Maybe the most useful Mint tool. I never used it, and I might never do.
  • Warpinator — oh, fuck! That used to be considered even more useful than Timeshift, but it had a history of being hard to build on non-Mint, non-Ubuntu distros. I haven’t tried it, but I’m told it doesn’t play well with Debian 13. Also, it might still hardcode #!/usr/bin/python3 instead of the more portable #!/usr/bin/env python3. Bad practices galore in Clem’s tools.
  • Web App Manager — relatively useful. It can turn any website into something that looks like a standalone desktop application, with its own window, icon, and isolated browser profile. Spectacular shortcuts, sort of.

Now, that’s quite a lot!

The Linux Mint ecosystem is increasingly messy. Let’s add apps instead of fixing bugs, eh? If this makes the congregation of Clem’s Witnesses happy, why not?