Mint is an Ubuntu flavor and uses their repos, and appears to have 1.6.0 and I presume GTK+, though it didn't identify the "not-free" that I do remember seeing before. You were correct on the path though, thank you.
I'm still deciding on my desktop (I think I'm going for KDE) and I'm gonna be giving this box one more fresh install before I commit, but I will look into getting the more recent version as per your recommendation. Any tutorials on how precisely to do that? I'm not a techie. (And yet I'm using Linux, so I must simply be mad
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Is anyone planning to get the a more recent version into the repos or at least just add another repo option and link to it from existing repo entries? (I assume the reason it's not already there is from Ubuntu's open source purist thing?)