After confirming that the beta version of Linux Mint 21.3 will be coming this week, the Linux Mint team has now published the ISO images of all three Linux Mint editions, which can be downloaded right now.
Linux Mint 21.3 is codenamed “Virginia” and it’s planned for release on Christmas 2023. The beta version is here to give us an early glimpse at the new features and improvements baked by the Linux Mint team into their popular Ubuntu-based distribution.
While the Xfce and MATE editions of Linux Mint 21.3 will probably be very boring, the flagship edition featuring the Cinnamon desktop environment comes with some exciting changes for Linux Mint fans, such as the latest and greatest Cinnamon 6.0 desktop release with initial Wayland support.
The Wayland support in Cinnamon comes in the form of an experimental “Cinnamon on Wayland” session that you will be able to enable from the login screen after logging out of the default session, which is still using Xorg Server. The Wayland session features experimental fractional scaling for HiDPI screens.
However, the final Linux Mint 21.3 release will still have an experimental Wayland session as Linux Mint project leader Clement Lefebvre doesn’t think Linux Mint needs to be fully ready for Wayland support before 2026 when the Linux Mint 23.x series will see the light of day, leaving them two years to perfect the Wayland session.
Apart from the experimental Wayland session, the Cinnamon 6.0 desktop environment brings various other goodies into the upcoming Linux Mint 21.3 release, such as the ability to download right-click context menu actions for the Nemo file manager the same way you’re downloading Cinnamon applets, desklets, extensions, and themes.
Experimental Wayland session on Linux Mint 21.3 Cinnamon
Cinnamon 6.0 also brings updated Sound and Power applets, support for AVIF images, a new gesture for desktop zoom, color picker support in the screenshot service, a new menu details option, an xdg-portal configuration file, as well as various other improvements.
For all three editions, Linux Mint 21.3 brings updated in-house built apps like the Hypnotix TV viewer app, which received the ability to save channels as favorites and create custom channels so you can use the app without any playlist or any IPTV provider.
Moreover, the Pix image viewer’s video playback has been enhanced to take the orientation of the video clip into account and automatically rotate it, the Bulky batch file renaming tool received support for thumbnails and drag and drop, and the Slick Greeter login screen now lets you configure the alignment of the login box.
Another noteworthy modification in the Linux Mint 21.3 release is the introduction of the “Romeo” unstable software repository. This permits the incorporation of cutting-edge features into the distribution. These features are anticipated to appear in upcoming versions of Linux Mint. Because of this shift, the unstable PPA of Linux Mint will be phased out.
At its core, Linux Mint 21.3 is still constructed on the Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) operating system series. It also runs on the long-term support Linux 5.15 LTS kernel series. Security updates will be provided for Linux Mint 21.3 until 2027.
Without any further delay, it’s possible to acquire the beta version of Linux Mint 21.3 at this time from the linked official mirrors. A formal announcement from the Linux Mint team is expected in the upcoming days.
Please keep in mind that this is a pre-release version of Linux Mint 21.3, so don’t use it for production work!
Download Linux Mint 21.3 Cinnamon (Beta)
Download Linux Mint 21.3 Xfce (Beta)
Download Linux Mint 21.3 MATE (Beta)
Last updated 3 hours ago