Mint 22, the Ubuntu Noble-based version, is here

Linux Mint 22 "Wilma" debuted late last week and holds on to the crown as the most sensible choice if you're looking to move across from Windows.

Version 22 is based on Ubuntu 24.04, which appeared in late April. The beta version of Ubuntu Noble was delayed, and correspondingly the Mint blog said in June that "there are many bugs in this BETA," followed by a summary in the July post:

Welcome, Wilma

Linux Mint always has codenames based on women's names, and Wilma puts The Reg FOSS desk in mind of nobody more than Mrs Flintstone herself. Wilma Flintstone is the most sensible and level-headed resident of 345 Cave Stone Road, the calmer one who often gets her rash and sometimes wildly exuberant husband out of trouble.

This is not entirely unlike the relationship between Linux Mint and its upstream distro Ubuntu. Ubuntu is Fred Flintstone: Full of great ideas, sometimes unconventional, and a risk-taker. Canonical has experimented with its own in-house desktops, display servers, and packaging formats; it tried versions for phones and tablets. Even now that it's middle-aged and slightly more settled, it remains controversial. It customizes the GNOME desktop, with its own colorful theme, as well as a dock and other additions, and has its own app store based on its own packaging format. These are all things that upset some people.

Mint, on the other hand, is Wilma Flintstone. Instead of Ubuntu's ten different desktop editions, it offers a choice of just three traditional, Windows-like desktops. All come in matching, plain, muted themes. (We particularly appreciate that, since in most distros which offer a choice of desktops, they each have totally mismatched themes.) Mint uses the open-standard Flatpak system for add-on software, but comes with natively packaged versions of Firefox and Thunderbird. It has built-in friendly graphical tools for backup and restore, now including OS snapshots.

What's new in 22?

We looked at the beta of Mint 22 earlier this month, as well as the standout feature of this version, the Cinnamon 6.2 desktop. This release of Cinnamon 6.2 offers experimental support for Wayland, which in this release seems to work well. Of the three desktops on offer, Cinnamon has the best support for fractional scaling, and if your computer has two screens with a different dot-pitch – such as one standard definition and one high DPI – then Cinnamon on Wayland may be the best option, as it can set separate DPI values for separate screens.

The Xfce edition has version 4.18, but as we mentioned looking at the beta version the MATE edition still has version 1.26 rather than the latest MATE 1.28, released in February.

Naturally enough, Mint 22's release notes show a lot in common with its upstream distro. Both contain many of the same underlying technologies. They use kernel 6.8, systemd 255, and the new Pipewire audio server. Their shared version of APT supports the new DEB822 format for specifying repositories, which splits one long line into separate stanzas. Mint removes and blocks the Snap packaging system, and the Snap-packaged versions of Firefox and Thunderbird.

Among Mint's own apps, the Software Manager has been tuned up. It's faster, and unverified Flatpak packages are off by default. You can enable unverified packages, of course, and then these apps show up – complete with a little red shield and a message that they're unverified, which is a worthwhile security improvement. Sadly, most users probably will need to enable them, because with them off, the store contains, for instance, no more Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge packages, because the copies on Flathub are not created or maintained by the vendors themselves. With only verified packages, Flathub's cupboard is suddenly bare, empty of anything you're really likely to want. This is a serious problem, as Canonical's recent problems on the Snap store show. Mint's solution is drastic, seriously limits Flatpak's usefulness, and highlights the riskiness of these largely unmanaged app stores.

Since Mint's default IRC client, Hexchat, was discontinued in February, Mint is moving to Matrix instead, via the Element web client in a dedicated Firefox window. (This seems overly drastic to us – there are plenty of alternative IRC clients.) Google may no longer care for JPEG-XL, but lots of others do, and the Mint 22's Pix image viewer gains support for it.

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Pix, though, is a GNOME-style CSD app, with no menu bar. There are quite a few of these in Mint now, including the Software Manager, Calculator, System Monitor, and more. This grumpy old vulture deeply dislikes the new style UI, and we thought that the whole point of creating and using MATE and Cinnamon was to avoid it. We'd much prefer to see the Cinnamon version of Mint adopt all the MATE accessories wholesale to banish CSD completely.

Indeed, the same goes for the Xfce edition of Mint. There is nothing wrong with the Xfce desktop's accessories at all, but having the same consistent set of accessories would make more sense to us. Using the same Nemo file manager – or MATE's Caja – seems worthwhile. Mint's Xfce flavor is very conservative, and lacks modern enhancements such as the Docklike Taskbar, as used in MX Linux and Asmi 24.04 too. As we noted about Linux Lite 6.4, it's missing there as well.

This release of Mint still uses Ubuntu's classic Ubiquity installer, again avoiding a novelty from newer versions of Ubuntu, the Subiquity installer.

Taking the Flintmobile for a spin

We tried all three versions in VirtualBox VMs. As the release notes warned it might, we found that the Cinnamon on X.org session froze up occasionally – even after giving the VM 128 MB of VRAM, as recommended. The Wayland version was stable, but has some glitches. For instance, the strip at the end of the taskbar, which under X.org hides all windows and shows the desktop, just like in Windows 7, doesn't work in Wayland and shows as a taskbar cogwheel icon. Windows don't hide, but while the button is "pressed" you can't use them, which confused us for a while.

The Xfce and MATE editions were more reliable, although the Xfce flavor showed a similar issue to our testing of Xubuntu 24.04 – sometimes, the first login attempt fails, and we needed to retry. All three editions took about the same disk space, some 11 GB. Cinnamon on X.org took 897 MB, while with Wayland it used 930 MB. The Xfce flavor idled at 814 MB of RAM, and MATE at 839 MB, on a fresh boot.

Although it isn't visible yet, there's one difference in this Mint release cycle. It will adopt Ubuntu's LTS Enablement Stack, sometimes called Hardware Enablement (HWE). This means that they'll get newer kernels and X.org updates found in Ubuntu's LTS point-releases, which derive from the interim versions of Ubuntu. This is normal for Ubuntu and has been for a decade or more, but Mint traditionally stayed on the same kernel version that the LTS was first released with – just picking up Canonical's updates for that kernel version. It remains to be seen, but this may mean no more of the Mint EDGE releases that the company put out for Mint 21 to enable users with newer hardware to install the distro.

The previous policy is going to impact some unsuspecting Mint users when they upgrade to Mint 22. As we mentioned when trying the Ubuntu "Noble" beta, its newer kernel won't work with Nvidia's legacy driver. Even users of Ubuntu's LTS release get periodic kernel updates from the HWE stack. Up until now, Mint users didn't.

This is from personal experience: Two of The Reg FOSS desk's Lenovo ThinkPads require the version 390 legacy driver, and their integrated Nvidia GPUs can't be upgraded. One of those machines ran Ubuntu short-term releases, and its GPU was knocked out by 23.10 "Mantic Minotaur." The other ran 22.04, and it stopped working in January when the LTS got a kernel upgrade. (We've pinned the old kernel on one, and switched the other to MX Linux.)

Users of Mint 21 are fine for now. It still uses an updated version of kernel 5.15, from when Ubuntu "Jammy" was released a little over two years ago. We expect complaints when they upgrade to Mint 22.

Speaking of 3D performance, this cynical vulture is not a big fan of performance testing. Back in the 20th century, we led an effort to port a complex Windows benchmark suite from 16-bit to 32-bit. The main thing we learned was that, given deep enough knowledge of contemporary hardware components, it was possible to accurately predict a benchmark score just from reading a hardware spec sheet. Saying that, we ran a simple in-browser 3D benchmark under Cinnamon to test Wayland against X11. Wayland was 2.5 percent quicker. (As an aside, the host machine was 851 per cent faster, which is why gaming in a VM is a bad idea.) Cinnamon's Wayland support may be experimental but it's quick enough.

Still the Bedrock distro

Linux Mint remains the most sensible, pragmatic desktop Linux out there. It builds in drivers and codecs that are optional extras in Debian and Fedora; users of those distros need expertise to find and install these. It offers more pragmatic desktops, with the same shared, familiar, conventional design, than mainstream Ubuntu – or any GNOME-based distro, for that matter. It offers better tools for routine admin tasks, such as finding mirrors or updating, than any of the bigger-name distros.

Saying that, it's not perfect, and in places the competition goes further. Zorin OS looks fresher, offers better tools for switching desktop layouts, and its developers are reproducing much of the same work in taming GNOME that Cinnamon does. Linux Lite simplifies the desktop choice, removes the fancy cross-platform packaging tools, and also has handy admin and setup tools – even in the shell – and a more helpful welcome screen. Asmi, previously called Zinc, has a bolder design, puts more effort into a better shell experience, and makes both Flatpak and Snap optional.

We reckon that the developers of Mint, ZorinOS, Linux Lite, and Asmi would all benefit from cooperating. For instance, on a coherent set of accessories with the classic UI, or a compatible set of extensions for Xfce, for example the dashboard and Docklike taskbar plugins. A shared repository with meta-packages of these would be a win. Perhaps they could even submit some improvements to the Xfce panel profiles tool, such as these modernized layouts. Over in GNOMEville, a lot of what Mint's Cinnamon achieves just replicates ZorinOS's GNOME extensions – and both do much the same as GNOME Flashback.

We did see a few glitches, especially in VMs – we suspect there may still be a few kinks to work out in Ubuntu Noble. Cautious upgraders should wait for Mint 22.1, but for new installs, Mint 22 remains the best-rounded Windows replacement there is. If you have an aging PC that can't run Windows 11, this is the one to try. ®