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The long-anticipated LMDE (Linux Mint Debian Edition) 6 “Faye” operating system is now available for public beta testing featuring the latest Cinnamon desktop environment and a Debian Bookworm base.
Based on the Debian GNU/Linux 12 “Bookworm” operating system series, Linux Mint Debian Edition 6 is powered by the long-term supported Linux 6.1 LTS kernel series and features the latest Cinnamon 5.8 desktop environment that was introduced with the Linux Mint 21.2 “Victoria” release in July 2023.
LMDE 6 contains all the changes of Linux Mint 21.2 Cinnamon and it appears to use PipeWire as the default audio backend. Other than that, you’ll get a solid Debian base, all of the goodies of the Cinnamon 5.8 desktop, improved support for Flatpak apps, and a global Dark Mode setting to support GTK4/libadwaita apps.
In addition, this release comes with a new look and feel thanks to newly added folder icons with different color variants, improved consistency of tooltips to look the same across different apps and desktops, support for symbolic icons that adapt to their background, and full support for HEIF and AVIF images.
The in-house built Xreader document viewer app received proper support for Adobe Illustrator documents, the Pix image viewer app now uses the gThumb 3.12.2 image viewer as its base, and the Software Manager app comes with a refreshed UI, better scoring/sorting algorithms, and a tuned package list.
LMDE 6 beta is available for download right now from the official Linux Mint mirrors around the world. I picked two mirrors below for your convenience if you want to grab the ISOs from this page without the fuss of manually searching through all the mirrors.
LMDE 6 is available for both 64-bit and 32-bit systems. However, please keep in mind that this is a pre-release version that should only be installed on a test machine and not on a production system.
Update 20/09/23: As of September 19th, LMDE 6 has a second beta release available for download. I’ve updated the download links below with the beta 2 ISOs.
Last updated 7 months ago
