Clement lefebvre posted the April note of news in Linux Mint, which corresponds to what happened in March 2024. The highlight for me appears in the middle of the note, and would be summarized by saying that while Canonical continues to act as Canonical, Linux Mint will continue to act as Linux Mint. In Ubuntu 24.04 there will be a new snap package, Thunderbird's, and the Mint developer team will do the same thing they've done with other packages recently.
Canonical's first controversial move in this regard was made with Chromium. He moved it to a snap package probably to test the waters, now Firefox is only available in the same format and he will return to his old ways with Thunderbird. About four years ago, Lefebvre and his team decided to compile Chromium to continue offering it as a .deb package, and exactly the same with Firefox. Thunderbird It will be the next app to enter this list, and Mint users will not have to rely on the snap package.
Other news in Linux Mint
We have to be careful with what we read today, it is April 1 and we can find anything, but we believe that Clem's note is serious. Among the new features in March, there are improvements for Linux Mint 22 installations. pre-installed packages for languages ​​other than English and the one we choose will be removed of installation, which will save space. If we are connected to the Internet, the language will be downloaded during the installation, but no connection is necessary for English, German, Spanish, French, Russian, Portuguese, Dutch and Italian languages.
During March, ISOs of EDGE versions have been released with new versions of the kernel to support new hardware. Among the rest of the news:
- Added support for the Deb 822 format in the Software Sources tool.
- Pipewire will be the default sound server in Linux Mint 22.
- The next version of Pix will support JXL images.
- There is a new preview manager in GIMP that will arrive with xapp-thumbnailers 1.2.4.
- A new XApp called GNOME Online Accounts GTK has been created that solves some problems with the GNOME application.
- Work continues on Jargonaut to be the Linux Mint chat application.
- Improvements to package repositories.
New kernel update cycle
An important fact is that with Linux Mint 22 will change the kernel update cycle. Mint is based on Ubuntu, in its LTS versions to be more specific, but it has its own personality. It chooses what it adopts and what it doesn't, and among what it has chosen not to adopt so far is the kernel.
Ubuntu usually arrives with a kernel maintained by Canonical. In provisional versions, those supported for 9 months, it is always the same, but in LTS it is updated as part of hardware activation (HWE). After a few months, they release point versions, such as 22.04.1 and the 22.04.2 most recent, and here we have the best example. The kernel was upgraded from the original 5.15 to 5.19, improving support for new hardware.
Linux Mint has been using Ubuntu's previous strategy with the kernel, i.e. keeping the original, but they have realized that it doesn't gain much in stability, to say the least. Therefore, starting with v22 they will start using the same Ubuntu kernel, starting with Linux 6.8. If nothing happens, in February 2025 Ubuntu will go up to approximately Linux 6.12-6.13, and Linux Mint, in this case, will follow. Although they have not said it clearly, this will make EDGE images no longer necessary, so they will cease to exist. The fact that he refers to these ISOs in the past tense seems to suggest this.
As a fact, they have analyzed the traffic and have come to the conclusion that Cinnamon is the option chosen by 2 out of 3 users (LMDE and Edge versions are included here), while 1 in 5 stays with Xfce.
Linux Mint 22 coming mid 2024 with these and other news that we will publish.