Linux Mint 18 is now in beta, and you can try it yourself. The stable version of this popular Ubuntu-based Linux distribution should be available soon.

Linux Mint’s 17.x series focused on polish and refinement atop a stable Ubuntu 14.04 LTS base. With Linux Mint 18, the project is upgrading to an Ubuntu 16.04 LTS base. This means a much more modern Linux kernel, newer drivers, and improved hardware support. More hardware should work better, and the software available in the repositories will be much newer. The shift to an Ubuntu 16.04 base means that Linux Mint 18 now includes the controversial systemd initialization program, as the Mint team had predicted. Both Ubuntu 16.04 and Debian 8, which Ubuntu is based on, use systemd by default.
Mint still offers two editions: one based on the more modern Cinnamon 3.0 desktop and another based on the MATE 1.14 desktop, which is based on the classic GNOME 2.0 code. These are newer versions of Cinnamon and MATE, which offer more polish.

As Linux Mint developer Clement Lefebvre announced in April, a collection of “xapps”—which are cross-desktop applications—will be compatible with both of Linux Mint’s desktop environments. The four xapps are Xplayer, a media player based on Totem; Xed, a text editor based on Pluma; Xviewer, a picture viewer based on Eye of GNOME; and Xreader, a document reader based on Atril.
Many applications now better support HiDPI displays, so they’ll work better on recent laptops and PC displays with pixel-dense screens.