The Linux Mint project has released the beta version of version 22, codenamed "Wilma" and featuring the latest Cinnamon desktop.

The beta of Mint 22 is based on Ubuntu 24.04 Noble Numbat, the latest LTS release that appeared late in April. The maintainers have a detailed What's New page detailing the features in this release.

One of the interesting aspects is that the What's New article discusses some of the problems facing the maintainers of distros based around GNOME and Gtk tools, especially since the GNOME 46 release. This is an ongoing issue, and Clem Lefebvre has tackled it a number of times. In the April post on the Mint blog, he talked about the problems of using GNOME accessory programs, such as GNOME-Scan and the File Roller archive manager, under other desktops. Due to GNOME's recent policy of removing theme support, GNOME apps look out of place on other desktops. This is the issue Mint's Xapps initiative tried to solve, but Lefebvre notes that it hasn't seen much uptake.

This means more of Mint's accessories must diverge from their upstream GNOME bases. So now there's a new tool to configure online accounts, based on the older Gtk3-based libgoa tool, called - rather confusingly, we feel - GNOME Online Accounts GTK. This works with Cinnamon, Xfce, MATE, and the Budgie desktop. Mint 22 also reverts to the older, Gtk3-based versions of the Celluloid movie player, as well as GNOME Calculator, Simple Scan, the Baobab disk usage analyzer, System Monitor, GNOME Calendar, File Roller, and Zenity. Also, as described in the May blog post, there's a new Software Manager, which opens much faster. Installation of unofficial Flatpak packages is now disabled by default, and if you enable it, unofficial packages are clearly highlighted. Given the recent problems with fake apps in Ubuntu's Snap store, this problem looks likely to grow.

As we mentioned last month, Mint 22 will include the latest Cinnamon desktop - version 6.2. Wayland support remains experimental, though. The Xfce edition has the latest version 4.18, but in slightly disappointing news, the MATE edition comes with the same MATE version 1.26.2 as used in Ubuntu MATE 24.04 - even though the latest release, MATE 1.28, appeared back in February. Enthusiasts for the GNOME 2-style desktop can only hope that this might be updated in Mint 22.1.

Other changes in Mint 22 include a native Debian-packaged version of the Thunderbird email client, improved trackpad drivers, better HiDPI support including on the login screen, and better handling of language support. Your preferred languages should be downloaded and installed during installation, saving a post-install step, and unused languages removed to save space.

Although it's built on a stable release of Ubuntu that's been out for a few months, this is still only a beta. You shouldn't try upgrading any computer you actually need to be able to use to it yet. It worked fine for us in VirtualBox, even though, as usual for Linux Mint, it didn't detect that it was in a VM or install the appropriate graphics drivers. ®

https://www.theregister.com//2024/07/03/linux_mint_22_beta/