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The Linux Mint 21.2 “Victoria” distribution appeared today on the project’s stable mirrors around the globe, which means that an official announcement will soon be posted by the developers to notify users who want to download the latest Linux Mint version.
Linux Mint 21.2 was in public beta testing since June 21st, 2023, which gave the developers enough time to fix remaining issues and offer users a stable and rock-solid release. Just like previous releases, Victoria is available with the Cinnamon, Xfce, and MATE desktop environments.
This is the second installment in the Linux Mint 21 series, which means that it’s based on Canonical’s long-term supported Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) operating system series and it’s powered by the Linux 5.15 LTS kernel series, which will also be supported for a few years.
While the Xfce and MATE editions include the same Xfce 4.18 and MATE 1.26 desktop environments that were present in the previous release, Linux Mint’s flagship edition featuring the Cinnamon desktop environment has been upgraded to the latest Cinnamon 5.8 release, which brings several new features and improvements.
For all editions, the Victoria release also brings a global Dark Mode setting to support GTK4/libadwaita apps, XDG Desktop Portal support to provide users with better compatibility for Flatpak apps, as well as support for Wayland sessions and multiple keyboard layouts in the login screen.
In addition, this release refreshes the look and feel of the distribution by adding new folder icons with different color variants, improves the consistency of the tooltips to look the same across different apps and desktops, realigns the titlebar buttons, and adds symbolic icons that adapt to their background.
Other changes include full support for HEIF and AVIF images, an updated Xreader document viewer app to properly support Adobe Illustrator documents, an updated Pix image viewer app with a rebase on the gThumb 3.12.2 image viewer, and an updated Software Manager app with a refreshed UI, 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, as well as the latest security patches. Also, NVIDIA GPU offload support has been updated to be handled by the libxapp library and delegated to switcheroo, which is used by Cinnamon and Mint Menu.
Since it’s based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, Linux Mint 21.2 is also a long-term support release that will be supported until 2027 with security patches and software updates. The next release, Linux Mint 21.3, will use the same package base as Linux Mint 21.2.
You can download Linux Mint 21.2 with Cinnamon, Xfce, or MATE desktops using the direct download links below. If you don’t want to download them before an official announcement is made in the next couple of days (once all the official mirrors are synced with the main download server), keep an eye on the Linux Mint website.
Update 16/07/23: Linux Mint 21.2 “Victoria” was officially announced on July 16th, 2023.
Last updated 10 months ago
