Linux Mint-21.3 screenshot
Few days ago The launch of the new Linux Mint 21.3 “Virginia” version was announced in which one of the most important new features of this release is the update of the Cinnamon 6.0 desktop environment with experimental support for Wayland, improvements and more.
This new version, which is presented by Linux Mint 21.3 »Virginia», It is the latest version of the 21.x series, aIn addition to being a long-term support (LTS) version and will be supported by the development team until 2027.
Main new features of Linux Mint 21.3 “Virginia”
This new version of Linux Mint 21.3 “Virginia” comes in desktop versions for Cinnamon, Xfce and MATE and, according to the announcement, it is based on a kernel Linux 5.15 and is built on the basis of Ubuntu 22.04.
One of the The most important news of this release is Cinnamon 6.0 coming with an experimental Wayland session, which after updating or installing the system, we can find within our login options a new entry "Cinnamon on Wayland" on the login screen. Of course, the default session still uses Xorg Server. Although in an experimental state, the Wayland session offers support for fractional scaling on HiDPI (4K) displays.
Since the experimental session, the developers warn users about possible problems with the stability of the environment or about missing features. However, Wayland support should gradually improve in later versions of Linux Mint.
Wayland is not the only insignia of this new version of Cinnamon 6.0, since in Linux Mint 21.3 “Virginia” offers several other features, such as the ability to download context menu actions for Nemo file manager the same way you download Cinnamon applets, desktops, extensions, and themes.
Also, Cinnamon 6.0 brings updated sound and power applets, support for AVIF images, a new gesture to Zoom on the desktop, support for color selection in the screenshot service, a new option for menu details, scale at 75%, keybinding for window opacity, as well as several other improvements.
Another improvement that this new version presents is in the player IPTV Hypnotix, in which the possibility of creating a list of favorite channels was added, as well as better support for playing videos from the YouTube service thanks to a new yt-dlp package update function.
Linux Mint 21.3 releases with full SecureBoot support and supports a wider variety of BIOSes and EFIs, as for a time there was a signature issue when booting Ubuntu and derivatives in EFI environments with secure boot enabled, which has long required keeping secure boot disabled and therefore which the team dedicated itself to reviewing from scratch the way in which ISOs are produced and packaged. With this, the mechanism is now much more optimized and rationalized, since it reduces dependence on Ubuntu and, according to Clem, reduces the differences between how ISOs are prepared for the LMDE editions of Linux Mint based on Ubuntu and Debian.
Of the other changes that stand out:
- The Warpinator local network file sharing app has the ability to create group code QR codes to quickly integrate camera-equipped devices and Warpinator for Android into the group.
- Bulky now creates file previews and supports drag and drop to possibly reorder files before renaming them.
- Ability to use “Romeo”, an unstable software repository to install advanced features.
- The backup tool, mintbackup, now has a header bar and an about dialog box.
- Added a color picker to the Xapp XDG desktop portal.
Finally if you are interested in knowing more about it, you can check the details in the following link
Download and try Linux Mint 21.3 Virginia
For those who are interested in being able to test this new version, you should know that the generated builds are based on MATE 1.26 (2.9 GB), Cinnamon 6.0 (2.9 GB) and Xfce 4.18 (2.8 GB).
The link of download is this.
Last but not least, as already mentioned, the new version is based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) and runs on the long-term supported Linux 5.15 LTS kernel series. It is worth mentioning that there is an EDGE ISO image with a newer kernel to improve hardware support, specifically the Linux 6.5 kernel.