Linux Mint 21 is out now and you can easily upgrade

In case you didn't already know Linux Mint 21 is officially out now with editions that come with the Cinnamon, MATE or Xfce desktop environments.

Safe to use on the desktop for gaming and work for many years, as it's a long-term support release that will keep going until 2027 with updates 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.

Pictured - Linux Mint Cinnamon Edition

Largely the same as the Beta I previously covered. With major changes to the display manager in Cinnamon, based on a much more modern version of Mutter that was previously rather outdated. 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.

How to upgrade? Linux Mint 20.3 to version 21 is reasonably easy and supported. In terminal run these commands:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install mintupgrade
sudo mintupgrade

Then you will be greeted by the official UI upgrade tool to follow along. After it's completed you can run these to finish:

sudo apt remove mintupgrade
sudo reboot

You can download from the official site.