A new version of the popular Linux distribution Linux Mint is available. Linux Mint 21.2 is available on download servers, but the official website has not been updated to announce the new release.
Linux Mint 21.2 is the second Linux Mint 21 point release. The original version was released in August 2022 and Linux Mint 21.1 followed in December of the same year.
Upgrades are, as usually, not enabled yet, but they should not pose problems for most users if the built-in Upgrade Tool is used. Standalone ISO images are already available for all three flavors, Cinnamon, Mate and Xfce, on the official download mirrors.
Linux Mint 21.2 is supported until 2027. The Linux Mint team will release another point release, Linux Mint 21.3, before it will move on to the next major version release of the Linux disstribution.
The official “What’s New” posts are also available, but not yet linked from the main site. You can check them out by following the links to Cinnamon’s, Mate’s and Xfce’s on the official site.
Lots of work went into visual changes in Linux Mint. Cinnamon, one of the desktop flavors, features styles now, which are designed to “make it really simple to switch to something that looks great, and to quickly browse what’s there” regardless of individually installed themes.
Linux Mint users pick one of the available styles, an appearance setting, which can be mixed, dark or light, and a color variant. Users who prefer more control may activate the advanced settings link to go back to the previous option of setting themes individually.
Several changes are shared across the three desktop environments. There is a new option to select different keyboard layouts from the login screen, an updated Software Manager user interface, vast improvements to Pix, an advanced image viewer and browser, including support for AVIF/HEIF, improved performance and support for RAW, Gif and TIFF, support for larger thumbnail sizes and a lot more.
Folder Icons are displayed as two-tones icons now and new color variants were introduced as well in the release.
Tooltips on the system are now “bigger, rounder and with larger margins”, which should give them a consistent look and feel across desktop environments.
The developers have added XDG Desktop Portal support for XApp for all desktop environments. This improves the compatibility between desktop environments and non-native applications, including flatpaks and GNOME apps.
As far as desktop environment specific changes are concerned, there are several noteworthy ones:
- Cinnamon notifications use accent colors now. (Cinnamon)
- Support for gestures was added to window management, workspace management, tiling and media controls. (Cinnamon)
- XReader supports Adobe Illustrator documents.
Check out the linked what’s new posts for additional release details.
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