Some good news coming out of camp Linux Mint, as the upcoming release of Linux Mint 22 is set to be quite a good one for bringing it up to standard like other distributions on newer tech.
Announced in a blog post, Mint's Clement Lefebvre mentioned various improvements coming like better localization support which will also use less disk space. Languages you don't pick will now properly be removed, and the ISO will actually have English, German, Spanish, French, Russian, Portuguese, Dutch and Italian requiring no extra downloads for those.
Something big for audio fans is that Linux Mint 22 will also finally swap over to Pipewire as the default sound server, the Software Sources tool will feature support for the new Deb822 format and the next version of Pix (their image viewer) will support JXL images.
Pictured - Linux Mint Cinnamon Desktop
Another big change is their kernel versioning. Mint has always been quite reserved on using newer kernels, often sticking with older versions. They have been shipping EDGE ISOs with newer kernels for a while, but now they're going to follow Ubuntu with shipping new kernel series release after Linux Mint 22 is live. As Lefebvre mentioned "we didn’t observe significant differences in terms of stability between LTS and HWE series" and that a "growing number of users with new laptops/chipsets relied on EDGE images" so this move makes sense.
They've also made a new XApp, GNOME Online Account GTK, with a goal to work across any desktop environment to connect to online accounts like Google, Microsoft and so on.
Snap is also another issue, as the Mint team continue to not particularly like Canonical's packaging format. With Ubuntu moving Thunderbird into a Snap, the Mint team will now be packaging it themselves as a .deb.
They're also continuing to work on Jargonaut, a modern chat application that uses IRC under the hood.
They're also now working with Fastly, to support their packaging repositories which should provide better speeds and overall stability.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Pipewire's drop-in replacements for PulseAudio and etc could already be deployed in Linux Mint by savvy users with enough free time on their hands, but yeah, this does make things waaaaay easier!
I could probably do this, but I am lazy.
That kind of user mostly doesn't use Mint, though. We use Mint so we don't have to be that kind of user!This is really nice to hear. While I was distrohopping last year, the only thing that got me off Mint was its lack of PipeWire. I had some audio issues running Mint and had to hop off.Pipewire's drop-in replacements for PulseAudio and etc could already be deployed in Linux Mint by savvy users with enough free time on their hands, but yeah, this does make things waaaaay easier!
So it's nice when Mint does the good stuff.
Mint is a great distro for anybody who doesn't mind the stable base and likes a more traditional desktop setup. I have no trouble fiddling with the system when needed, but I do appreciate the fact that Mint mostly makes it unnecessary.That kind of user mostly doesn't use Mint, though. We use Mint so we don't have to be that kind of user!This is really nice to hear. While I was distrohopping last year, the only thing that got me off Mint was its lack of PipeWire. I had some audio issues running Mint and had to hop off.Pipewire's drop-in replacements for PulseAudio and etc could already be deployed in Linux Mint by savvy users with enough free time on their hands, but yeah, this does make things waaaaay easier!
So it's nice when Mint does the good stuff.
Sil_el_mot Apr 4
Mint is probably gonna be an endgame distro for me when it gets Distrobox 1.7.1 in its repos, since 1.7.1 is the version that adds Nvidia driver passthrough support.Mint 22 will have it, but it's already available for Mint 21 from the official PPA.
Mint is probably gonna be an endgame distro for me when it gets Distrobox 1.7.1 in its repos, since 1.7.1 is the version that adds Nvidia driver passthrough support.Mint 22 will have it, but it's already available for Mint 21 from the official PPA.
Awesome, thanks for the info, much appreciated.
Probably gonna wait for Wilma to come out and switch. I'm used to being on arch but I really wanna go for a "I don't have to worry about stuff, it'll just work fine" distro, so I've been branching out, and 1.7.1 on distrobox lets me do that without losing a single important thing I use from the AUR or dependencies I need to build certain things from source.
The only thing I'd want from mint after this is for it to get a KDE Plasma spin and to just keep being an awesome beginner friendly distro in general.
Patreon
PayPal
See more from me