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The beta version of the upcoming Linux Mint 21.2 “Victoria” distribution has been uploaded today to the main server and official mirrors for adventurous users who want to get a glimpse of what’s new in the forthcoming release.
Dubbed “Victoria”, Linux Mint 21.2 is the third installment in the Linux Mint 21 series, which is based on Canonical’s long-term supported Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) operating system series and powered by Linux kernel 5.15 LTS.
Linux Mint 21.2 Beta is available in three editions with the Cinnamon 5.8, Xfce 4.18, and MATE 1.26 desktop environments preinstalled. As expected, the Cinnamon edition remains the flagship and it brings the most interesting changes and new features.
Among these, there’s support for touchpad and touchscreen gestures, a global Dark Mode setting for supporting GTK4/libadwaita apps, XDG Desktop Portal support to provide users with better compatibility for Flatpak apps, support for accent colors, a faster Nemo file manager with new folder icons, as well as revamped tooltips and notifications.
Linux Mint 21.2 also looks to bring a much-improved login manager with better keyboard navigation, support for Wayland sessions, support for LXQt/Pademelon badges, a configurable layout for the Onboard on-screen keyboard, a scrollable session list, support for multiple keyboard layouts, and better touchpad support with automatic detection and enablement of tap-to-click.
Full support for HEIF and AVIF images will be available as well in the upcoming Linux Mint release, which will also update the in-house built Xreader document viewer app to properly support Adobe Illustrator documents and the Pix image viewer app with a rebase on the gThumb 3.12.2 image viewer.
Also updated in Linux Mint 21.2 is the Software Manager app, which received a UI refresh, better scoring/sorting algorithms, and a tuned package list. Moreover, the Warpinator app received support for the Landlock and Bubblewrap technologies to implement folder isolation.
At the moment of writing, there’s no official announcement from the Linux Mint team, and that’s because the ISO images are still being fetched by the multitude of download mirrors around the world. It usually takes a few days for all the mirrors to offer the new ISO images.
When the process is complete, the official website will be updated with the download links for the beta version. Until the Linux Mint team officially announces the release of Linux Mint 21.2 Beta, you can download the live ISO images with Cinnamon, Xfce, and MATE flavors using the links below, which point to various official mirrors.
I have to remind you that this is a pre-release version so don’t install or use it on a production machine!
Update 21/6/23: The Linux Mint team officially announced the availability of the beta version for Linux Mint 21.2. Check out their blog archives for more details.
Last updated 11 months ago
