Linux Mint Now Supports Flatpak Update via Updater + More Updates

The Mint team announced interesting enhancements in the monthly update, such as Flatpak support in the update manager and more.

Support for Flatpak Update via Updater

The October 2022 update from the Mint team brings some much-needed feature refreshes for its existing versions. First and foremost, the Mint updater utility now supports Flatpak. That means you can now use the update manager itself to update your Flatpak packages from Flathub or other remotes. You don’t need to use the flatpak update command to do that separately.

Linux Mint update showing Flatpak packages (Image credit: Linux Mint team)

This is indeed a great feature, considering it’s a beginner Linux distro, because new users can go on with their work without worrying about Flatpak or any other packages.

Show-desktop icon changes

Show desktop icon changes its place (Image credit: Linux Mint team)

Another update which might feel similar to Windows is a narrow sidebar to show desktop functionality. Initially, it was an icon present beside the launcher at the left. Now it’s a narrow vertical button. It is present at the extreme right of the bottom panel. This exactly looks like Windows 10 shows the desktop button in the same place. Reason? The mint team wants a seamless experience for the users migrating from Windows so that they don’t need to learn things again.

In addition, it takes less space, and you can click on it faster by navigating your mouse.

Additional Updates

Furthermore, one of the visual changes arrives for the Nemo file manager. When you select a file, only the file name gets highlighted; instead of the icons as well.

Although it looks clean, but I feel the entire icon, including the text, should be highlighted like here in Nautilus.

Elsewhere, some small yet useful updates arrive. Such as a new desktop context menu option to launch display settings and fewer password prompts while performing trivial actions (removing entries from the menu, uninstalling Flatpak and others).

While the team is busy with the upcoming December 2022 release of the new Linux Mint 21.1 “Vera”, all of these changes should be available immediately in the current 21.0 release. The upcoming release “Vera” brings changes to the driver manager, a cleaner desktop view and much more.

To experience the above features, simply update your current Linux Mint 21 installation via updater.

Via Mint monthly update.

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