Linux Mint 21 Beta Is Now Available for Download, Here’s a First Look

Linux Mint 21 Beta

The beta version of the upcoming Linux Mint 21 operating system series is now available for public testing ahead of the final release later this summer.

Development of Linux Mint 21 “Vanessa” kicked off a few months ago, and the upcoming distribution will be based on the repositories and base packages of Canonical’s latest Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) operating system series, which will be supported for the next five years, just like Linux Mint 21.

Linux Mint 21 will ship not only with newer core components (e.g. Linux kernel, Mesa graphics stack, GCC, GNU C Library) from Ubuntu 22.04 LTS, but also with a newer version of the in-house developed Cinnamon desktop environment, namely Cinnamon 5.4, which brings numerous new features and improvements.

Bluetooth improvements will also be present in the upcoming Linux Mint 21 release as the development team adopted of the Blueman 2.3 GTK+ Bluetooth manager as a drop-in replacement for the Blueberry Bluetooth configuration tool that’s currently being used in the Linux Mint 20 series.

Other highlights of Linux Mint 21 include home directory encryption in the installer, support for WebP images in the Xviewer in-house developed image viewer, as well as in thumbnails so you can see a preview of these images in the file manager.

Last month, the Linux Mint announced that they took over the development of the Timeshift backup utility, and the next major release of the distribution will ship with an updated version capable of calculating the required space for the next snapshot when used in rsync mode so that you won’t end up with zero disk space.

Other noteworthy changes in Linux Mint 21 include os-prober by default to ensure out-of-the-box dual boot detection for those who want to install the Ubuntu-based distribution alongside Windows or another GNU/Linux distribution, and the removal of systemd-oom due to some performance issues.

If you want to give Linux Mint 21 a try before the final release, you can download the beta version right now as Cinnamon, Xfce, and MATE editions using the direct download links below. While your download completes, check out my first look video at Linux Mint 21 “Vanessa”.

Last updated 2 years ago

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