Linux Mint – the Ubuntu-based distro accessible with three (opens in new tab) totally different (opens in new tab) desktops (opens in new tab) – has been refreshed with a brand new LTS model, Mint 21, that is accessible to obtain now.
Named Vanessa, this distro is predicated on Ubuntu 22.04 (opens in new tab) and gives assist till April 2027. Variations can be found with Cinnamon, Gnome MATE, and the light-weight Xfce desktop environments. System necessities are low, with a minimal of 2GB of RAM (4GB advisable), 20GB of storage, and a 64-bit processor required for set up.
Some can be happy to listen to that Mint jettisons Canonical’s Snap app set up system in favor of Flatpak, although this isn’t a brand new characteristic in Mint 21. What you do get is a brand new Bluetooth applet — Blueman as an alternative of the Gnome-centric Blueberry — new thumbnails for beforehand unsupported filetypes together with Webp, and a few love for the Notes app, which may now take care of duplicate content material, has a restyled systray icon, and cycles by way of colours as an alternative of selecting them randomly. Driverless printing and scanning now communicates with units with out, effectively, you guessed it, and there is now a visual swap for hopping between graphics playing cards utilizing Nvidia Prime.
This isn’t earthshaking stuff, and whereas issues like an enormous replace to the Muffin window supervisor in Cinnamon (bringing it to Mutter 3.36 after 11 years at 3.2) and new GTK antialiasing on all home windows make the desktop look cleaner and extra trendy, the actual fact is Mint and Ubuntu are mature merchandise that get numerous issues proper.Â
With its inexperienced ‘go’ button within the backside left nook precisely the place Home windows customers anticipate finding it, Mint is an efficient selection for anybody with an previous laptop computer they wish to give a brand new lease of life, or for anybody curious about dabbling on this planet of Linux, although sadly not like Ubuntu you’ll be able to’t set up it on a Raspberry Pi (opens in new tab). An ISO of the Cinnamon model is a 2.4GB obtain from linuxmint.com (opens in new tab).
