Linux Mint 21 Vanessa released - New features and changes

Linux mint version 21 code named Vanessa was released recently based on Ubuntu 22.04 which is a long term support release and will be supported until 2027. It comes with updated software and brings refinements and many new features to make your desktop experience more comfortable. Let us take a look at some of the major changes and updates.

Blueman replaces Blueberry

In Linux Mint 21 Blueman replaces Blueberry. Blueman is desktop-agnostic similar to Blueberry and integrates well in all environments.

Blueberry depended on gnome-bluetooth, which was developed exclusively for GNOME. In contrast, Blueman relies on the standard Bluez stack which works everywhere and can even be used or queried from the command line.

Blueman's UI was polished for mint and looks much better than before. Blueman also received support for many symbolic icons which gives it a much more refined look and integrates it with other mint's applications.

It has many features out of the box which you might find missing from Blueberry. The Blueman manager and tray icon provide many features that weren't available in Blueberry and a lot more information which can be used to monitor your connection or troubleshoot Bluetooth issues.

Out of the box Blueman features better connectivity, especially when it comes to headsets and audio profiles.

Blueman and Bluez are actively developed by the open source community and used in many environments.

Thumbnailers

Earlier Linux Mint's file explorer, Nemo File Explorer, lacked support for some file types. To address it a new Xapp project called xapp-thumbnailers was started and is now featured in Linux Mint 21.

The project brings support for the following mimetypes:

AppImage
ePub
MP3 (album cover)
RAW pictures (most formats)
Webp

Sticky Notes

Sticky notes is an application which we all have used at least once. It is a handy and useful tool which helps in remembering things, taking notes and sticking them to the desktop.

The Sticky Notes application now has the ability to duplicate notes. When Sticky Notes is told to pick different colors for newly created notes it no longer picks them randomly, but cycles through the color set to maximize the probability of each note having a different color.

Some other changes are -

The systray icon was restyled.
New notes are positioned relative to their parent.
Clicking the tray icon creates a new note if none are present.

Cinnamon 5.4

Linux Mint 21 features a new version of cinnamon, Cinnamon 5.4, which has many new exciting changes and improvements. The most noticeable and biggest change among them is the Mutter rebase.

Mutter Rebase

Muffin is the windows manager used by cinnamon. It is now based on Mutter 3.36 and its codebase is much closer to upstream than before.

Muffin was forked from Mutter 3.2, and the plan wasn't to develop a different window manager but simply to make Cinnamon compatible with all distributions of Linux by guaranteeing it had the same manager everywhere, no matter what version of Mutter was shipped.

Long story short, the Muffin codebase became very different from Mutter and, so this release brings them closer to each other once again.

Other Improvements

Along with bug fixes Cinnamon 5.4 also features the following improvements:

The CJS interpreter, which was previously based on GJS 1.66.2, was rebased on GJS 1.70.
The settings daemon features improved MPRIS support.
Right-clicking an application in the main menu, shows a context menu. If the application provides commands, these commands are now added to this menu.

Some other noticeable changes includes

Process Monitor was added to Linux Mint to detect automated updates and automated system snapshots running in the background.
Timeshift is now maintained as an XApp and its translations are done on Launchpad.

To read more about Linux Mint 21, check out Linux Mint's official blog here.

Read the original article here

Have you tried out Linux Mint 21 yet? Share your thoughts in the comments below.