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The highly anticipated Linux Mint 21.3 “Virginia” distribution is now available for download from the multitude of mirrors around the world of the Linux Mint project, ahead of the official unveiling later this week.
Codenamed “Virginia”, Linux Mint 21.3 features the latest Cinnamon 6.0 desktop environment for its flagship editions, which comes with an experimental Wayland session for those who want their Linux Mint flavor on top of Wayland.
After upgrading to Linux Mint 21.3, users will find a new “Cinnamon on Wayland” entry on the login screen. Of course, the default session is still using Xorg Server. While it’s in an experimental state, the Wayland session offers support for fractional scaling on HiDPI (4K) screens.
Apart from the experimental Wayland session, the Cinnamon 6.0 desktop environment brings various other goodies to the 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.
In addition, Cinnamon 6.0 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, 75% scaling, window opacity keybinding, an xdg-portal configuration file, as well as various other improvements.
The other supported editions of Linux Mint 21.3 ships with the Xfce 4.18 and MATE 1.26 desktop environments, unchanged from the previous Linux Mint 21.2 “Victoria” release.
All three Linux Mint 21.3 editions include updated in-house built apps, such as 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.
The Pix image viewer’s video playback has been enhanced in this release to take the orientation of the video clip into account and automatically rotate it. Also, the Bulky batch file renaming tool received support for thumbnails and drag and drop.
Moreover, the Slick Greeter login screen has been updated to let users configure the alignment of the login box, and the Warpinator file-sharing app received the ability to connect to another device manually, either by entering an IP address or by using a QR code on a mobile device.
Another interesting change in the Linux Mint 21.3 “Virginia” release is the ability to use the “Romeo” unstable software repository to install bleeding-edge features into the distribution. Due to this change, Linux Mint’s unstable PPA has been deprecated.
Under the hood, Linux Mint 21.3 is based on the Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (Jammy Jellyfish) operating system series and it’s powered by the long-term supported Linux 5.15 LTS kernel series. An EDGE ISO image will be available in the coming weeks with a newer kernel for enhanced hardware support, namely Linux kernel 6.5.
Linux Mint 21.3 also comes with full support for SecureBoot, compatibility with a wide range of BIOS and EFI implementations, EFI mode by default for the GRUB bootloader, and BIOS mode by default for the ISOLINUX/Syslinux bootloader.
Like with previous releases in the Linux Mint 21 series, Linux Mint 21.3 will receive security updates until 2027. You can download Linux Mint 21.3 right now using the direct download buttons below. An official announcement will be published by the Linux Mint team in the coming days on their blog.
More details about this release are available on the official website.
Last updated 4 months ago
