It’s official, Linux Mint 16 Petra will be released with Cinnamon 2.0 and MATE 1.8. For Cinnamon 2.0, the Linux Mint developers aim to replace all the Gnome applications with ones developed by themselves.
Also, Linux Mint 16 Petra include MintStick, a graphical interface for the DD tool (disk dump), that allows the user to create bootable pendrives or memory cards.
A RC version of Linux Mint 16 Petra should be released in the following weeks, while the stable version is scheduled for November 2013. Linux Mint 16 Petra will have support for both 32 bit and 64 bit architectures and will come in the following flavours: Cinnamon, MATE, KDE and XFCE.
For those who don’t know, Cinnamon and MATE are both forks of the Gnome 2 desktop environment. While Cinnamon is developed by the Linux Mint developers, MATE has been created by the Arch Linux team.