09 January 2012, 15:17

Blue Systems becomes Linux Mint partner and sponsor

Linux Mint logo Clement Lefebvre, leader of the Linux Mint project, has announced that Blue Systems, a German company, has become a partner of the Linux Mint project. The partnership is focused on improving the KDE editions of Linux Mint KDE and Blue Systems-sponsored Netrunner – Lefebvre says that this should have a positive effect on both distributions even though they offer different experiences. Lefebvre also notes that Blue Systems will become the primary sponsor for Linux Mint, in a deal that has allowed the Mint developers to contract an additional full-time developer for all of 2012.

Netrunner logo Little is known about Blue Systems apart from their sponsorship of the Netrunner Ubuntu-based Linux distribution which features a tuned KDE 4 desktop with GNOME applications and Wine integrated, and kde_gtk_config, a GTK look and feel configuration utility for KDE. NetRunner 4.0 "Dryland" was released at the end of December. The last edition of Linux Mint that had a KDE desktop environment available was Linux Mint 10, "Julia", released in February 2011, three months after the release of the GNOME edition.