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After confirming that the beta version of Linux Mint 21.3 will be coming this week, the Linux Mint team has now published the ISO images of all three Linux Mint editions, which can be downloaded right now.
Linux Mint 21.3 is codenamed “Virginia” and it’s planned for release on Christmas 2023. The beta version is here to give us an early glimpse at the new features and improvements baked by the Linux Mint team into their popular Ubuntu-based distribution.
While the Xfce and MATE editions of Linux Mint 21.3 will probably be very boring, the flagship edition featuring the Cinnamon desktop environment comes with some exciting changes for Linux Mint fans, such as the latest and greatest Cinnamon 6.0 desktop release with initial Wayland support.
The Wayland support in Cinnamon comes in the form of an experimental “Cinnamon on Wayland” session that you will be able to enable from the login screen after logging out of the default session, which is still using Xorg Server. The Wayland session features experimental fractional scaling for HiDPI screens.
However, the final Linux Mint 21.3 release will still have an experimental Wayland session as Linux Mint project leader Clement Lefebvre doesn’t think Linux Mint needs to be fully ready for Wayland support before 2026 when the Linux Mint 23.x series will see the light of day, leaving them two years to perfect the Wayland session.
Apart from the experimental Wayland session, the Cinnamon 6.0 desktop environment brings various other goodies into the upcoming Linux Mint 21.3 release, such as the ability to download right-click context menu actions for the Nemo file manager the same way you’re downloading Cinnamon applets, desklets, extensions, and themes.
Cinnamon 6.0 also brings updated Sound and Power applets, support for AVIF images, a new gesture for desktop zoom, color picker support in the screenshot service, a new menu details option, an xdg-portal configuration file, as well as various other improvements.
For all three editions, Linux Mint 21.3 brings updated in-house built apps like the Hypnotix TV viewer app, which received the ability to save channels as favorites and create custom channels so you can use the app without any playlist or any IPTV provider.
Moreover, the Pix image viewer’s video playback has been enhanced to take the orientation of the video clip into account and automatically rotate it, the Bulky batch file renaming tool received support for thumbnails and drag and drop, and the Slick Greeter login screen now lets you configure the alignment of the login box.
Another interesting change in the Linux Mint 21.3 release is the ability to use the “Romeo” unstable software repository to install bleeding-edge features into the distribution, which will be implemented in future Linux Mint releases. Due to this change, Linux Mint’s unstable PPA will be deprecated.
Under the hood, Linux Mint 21.3 is still based on the Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) operating system series and it’s powered by the long-term supported Linux 5.15 LTS kernel series. Linux Mint 21.3 will receive security updates until 2027.
Without further ado, you can download the beta version of Linux Mint 21.3 right now from the official mirrors linked below. An official announcement will be made by the Linux Mint team in the next few days.
Please keep in mind that this is a pre-release version of Linux Mint 21.3, so don’t use it for production work!
Last updated 5 months ago
