Linux Mint 21 Beta now available

The Linux Mint team are gearing up for another major release with Linux Mint 21 now available in Beta to download.

This is their next long-term support release, so you'll be able to continue running it until 2027 thanks to it being based upon Ubuntu 22.04. You will get Linux Kernel 5.15 and depending on which edition you go for Cinnamon 5.4, MATE 1.26 or Xfce 4.16.

Quite a lot is new with this release, especially with the Cinnamon desktop environment which had a huge change to the window manager to be based on a much more modern version of Mutter. Their last fork was 11 years ago, so a lot has changed in that time. Their priority has been to make them as close as possible, which should enable them to do more upgrades earlier in future.

They've also ported over the display settings from Gnome, plus plenty of theme tweaks to make applications match with the GTK theme.

Some of the other major changes includes:

• A switch from Blueberry to Blueman for Bluetooth
• New Xapp project called xapp-thumbnailers, providing thumbnails for many more file types
• Upgrades to the Sticky Notes application
• A process monitor to inform you when automated tasks are happening that might slow your PC down
• Webp support was added to xviewer and thumbnailers.
• The WebApp manager supports additional browsers and custom browser parameters.
• In Software Sources, the repository list, PPA list and key list support multiple selection. This allows several items to be removed at a time.
• Mint now uses IPP (Driverless Printing and Scanning)

Plus lots more.

See more on the Linux Mint website.