Linux Mint 22.1 is now available in beta. It’s a fairly substantial upgrade with several new features and improvements, including the new Cinnamon 6.4 desktop environment.
Cinnamon 6.4 provides improved Wayland compatibility, meaning that there should be fewer bugs and visual inconsistencies across the Mint operating system. Apps and features that require admin privileges, including some system settings, should be more reliable than in the previous Mint release.
Plus, Cinnamon 6.4 unlocks a new default theme, updated dialog boxes, and additional visual preferences. The new theme features a ton of rounded elements to provide a cleaner look and feel, similar to what we see in a lot of other modern operating systems. Dialog boxes are also rounded and now feature more defined buttons, and you can set notifications to appear above fullscreen windows, though this setting is not enabled by default.
There’s also a new Night Light feature to replace the Wayland-incompatible Redshift. Night Light adjusts the color temperature of your screen to reduce blue light exposure around bedtime. This feature has a preset “automatic” mode, though you can also set Night Light to your preferred hours (or just leave it on all the time).
Under-the-hood, Linux Mint 22.1 introduces a modernized, streamlined set of package management tools and libraries. Linux Mint has transitioned away from aptdaemon in favor of Aptkit and Captain, which resolves longstanding bugs and provides a simplified architecture for both package management and OS development. The change also solves Linux Mint’s spotty localization problem—the operating system is now fully translated into other languages.
The Linux Mint team will provide security updates for Mint 22.1 through 2029. They’ll continue using the existing Ubuntu 24.04 package base through 2026, too, meaning that upgrades to future versions of the Mint operating system should be trivial. And, like Linux Mint 22, the 22.1 release ships with Linux Kernel 6.8.
You can download the Linux Mint 22.1 “Xia” Beta ISO from the Linux Mint Blog. Of course, this is a beta release that may contain critical bugs—it should not be used for production work, and most users should simply wait for the stable version to arrive around
Christmastime. If you choose to install the beta, you’ll have the option to upgrade to the stable release when it goes live.
Source: Linx Mint Blog
