Linux Mint 20 is here and these are its most important news and changes

During this weekend the launch of the new version of the popular Linux distribution "Linux Mint 20" was presented, which comes with a large number of changes and news, as well as the fact that this new version is based on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.

For those who are still unfamiliar with the distribution, you should know that it is fully compatible with Ubuntu, but differs significantly in the approach to organizing the user interface and the selection of default applications.

Linux Mint developers provide a desktop environment that matches the classic canons of desktop organization, which is more familiar to users who do not accept the new methods of creating the GNOME 3 interface.

Main new features of Linux Mint 20

Of the main novelties of the new version we can find that Linux Mint 20 "Ulyana" takes the base of Ubuntu 20.04 and includes the Linux kernel 5.4, with which it is a version that will have updates and support until 2025.

Although it is important to mention that Snap and Snapd are excluded from delivery, and automatic installation of Snapd along with other packages installed through APT is also prohibited. Although, if desired, the user can install snapd manually, but adding it with other packages without the knowledge of the user is prohibited.

Another change is that builds for 86-bit x32 systems have been discontinued. Like Ubuntu, the distribution is now available only on 64-bit systems.

For the versions of MATE 1.24 and Cinnamon 4.6, the design and organization of the work in which the ideas of GNOME 2 continue to develop is highlighted.

As for the the Cinnamon version Linux Mint, includes Cinnamon 4.6 now I know supports fractional scaling, allowing you to select the optimal size of the items on the high-pixel-density (HiDPI) screen, for example, you can increase the output interface items are 2 times and 1,5.

Besides that work was done on ensuring optimized code performance for process thumbnails in file manager Nemo. Thumbnails are now generated asynchronously, and thumbnails are loaded with lower priority than directory navigation.

Added the ability to select screen refresh rate and the support to assign its own scale factors for each monitor, which solves the problem with the operation when connecting a regular monitor and HiDPI.

Generally for distribution, now a new Warpinator utility is included to exchange files between two computers on a local network, using encryption for data transfer.

In addition, full support for the On-Demand profile has been implemented, that when enabled, by default, las Intel GPUs are used for rendering in session, and the application menu provides the ability to run each program using the NVIDIA GPU.

The capacity of handling mouse wheel scroll events has been added to the XappStatusIcon applet and a new function similar to gtk_menu_popup () has been implemented, which simplifies the transfer of applications with GtkStatusIcon.

Applets Blueberry, mintupdate, mintreport, nm-applet, mate-power-manager, mate-media, redshift and rhythmbox were translated to use XAppStatusIcon, which allowed to give the system tray an improved look.

All the editions (Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce) have unified many icons in the systray, they have added symbolic icons and implemented support for high pixel density displays (HiDPI).

Of the other changes:

• In the Xed text editor support has been added for concatenating lines and removing empty lines before saving the file.
• In Xviewer, buttons have been added to the panel to switch to full screen mode and display a large format slideshow. Storage of opening the window in full screen is provided.
• In the Xreader document viewer, a print button is added to the panel.
• The Gdebi interface has been completely redesigned, utilities to open and install deb packages.
• New yellow directory icons added.
• In the welcome login interface, the user is asked to select a color scheme.
• Added support for stretching the background image on multiple monitors to the login screen (Slick Greeter).
• Apturl has changed the backend from Synaptic to Aptdaemon.
• In APT, for newly installed packages (not for updates), installing packages from the recommended category is recommended by default.
• When starting a live session running VirtualBox, the screen resolution is set to at least 1024 × 768.

More information and download.