Linux Mint team wants to release Linux Mint 19 in May or June 2018

The release of Linux Mint 18.3 in November 2017 put the development focus of the team on Linux Mint 19, the next major version of the popular Linux distribution.

Linux Mint 19 is the first significant release of the operating system since June 2016 when Linux Mint 17, codename Sarah, was released by the team.

The developers plan to release Linux Mint 19 "around May/June 2018". Just like its predecessors, Linux Mint 19 will be supported for a total of five years until 2023. The previous versions of Linux Mint, Linux Mint 17.x and Linux Mint 18.x, are supported until April 2019 and 2021 respectively.

Continued support for older versions means that users don't need to rush to upgrade machines to the new release version of Linux Mint as previous versions are still supported when Linux Mint 19 is released.

Linux Mint 19 will be based on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Long Term Service release). Ubuntu's development team aims for an April 2018 release for the new Ubuntu version that is codenamed Bionic Beaver, and Linux Mint 19 will follow soon thereafter.

The two current versions of Linux Mint, Linux Mint 17.x, and 18.x are also based on Ubuntu LTS releases. Linux Mint 17 is based on Ubuntu 14.04, and Linux Mint 18.x is based on Ubuntu 16.04.

The new Linux Mint version goes under the codename Tara, and it is likely that future versions of Linux Mint 19.x will use codenames starting with T as well as previous versions followed that scheme.

The only other bit of information that the team shared in a blog post on the official Linux Mint Blog is that Linux Mint 19 will use GTK 3.22.

"GTK 3.22 is a major stable release for GTK3. From there on, the theming engine and the APIs are stable. This is a great milestone for GTK3. It also means Linux Mint 19.x (which will become our main development platform) will use the same version of GTK as LMDE 3, and distributions which use components we develop, such as Fedora, Arch..etc. This should ease development and increase the quality of these components outside of Linux Mint."