Linux Mint 21 "Vanessa" Arrives. And It Looks Minty-Fresh

Linux Mint 21 “Vanessa” is now officially released. Here’s what’s new.

After finishing the successful BETA testing, the team announced today the release of the 36th edition of Linux Mint – “Vanessa”. This release brings significant updates and improvements compared to the earlier Linux Mint 20 series.

Let me round up the essential features before proceeding to the download.

Linux Mint 21 Beta - Cinnamon Desktop — Linux Mint 21 Beta – Cinnamon Desktop

Linux Mint 21 – What’s New

Core changes and Cinnamon Desktop

Firstly, Linux Mint 21 “Vanessa” is based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS “Jammy Jellyfish”, which was released in April this year. Hence, you get the updated toolchain, packages, core updates and the latest LTS Linux Kernel. Linux Mint 21 features Linux Kernel 5.15, the current LTS Kernel bringing the latest hardware support across Kernel modules.

Secondly, Linux Mint “Vanessa” also features the latest Cinnamon desktop 5.4, the flagship desktop environment for Linux Mint. Cinnamon 5.4 finally completes the rebasing of Mutter to its window manager Muffin. Over the years, the Mutter rebasing was ongoing, and eventually, Muffin caught up with the upstream. You can experience this latest version of CInnamon for the first time with Linux Mint 21.

Note: If you are using Arch Linux, you may try to install the Cinnamon Desktop 5.4 right now, as it’s available. You may refer to the installation guide here.

Another core change in Cinnamon 5.4 is that some important display settings move away from gnome-control-center to the cinnamon-control-center. Although you may not see many changes visually, you should experience faster performance while managing displays.

The GTK dialogs now get properly rendered in Cinnamon 5.4, thanks to the uniform rendering. So, if you use an app that uses a separate GTK header bar, it looks better and more immersive with the Cinnamon desktop.

Other changes

In addition to the above, the famous Timeshift tool for backup is now a Xapp managed by Linux Mint. Hence you can expect a better vision, control and roadmap of this backup tool.

Also, the Nemo file manager now supports WebP images by default for thumbnail and viewing via xviewer.

The Xfce and MATE desktops did not have significant releases for a year or more. Hence, you get the same desktop in this release, i.e. Xfce 4.16 and MATE 1.24.

Finally, other noteworthy changes include:

The document reader Xreader now supports minor annotation.
You can now pass through custom parameters to browsers while using WebApp.
Thanks to the Mint team, you can still enjoy Firefox as a vanilla deb package, not the Snap version (like in Ubuntu 22.04).
The Bluetooth manager in Linux Mint is now Blueman which replaces Blueberry. Blueman brings more features and updates.
The Systemd OOM (out of memory) service is disabled by default in Linux Mint since various reports of premature killing of processes in Ubuntu 22.04 surfaced a while back.

We have an exclusive feature highlights article of this release, which you may want to check out: 👇