♞ Coming up on 9TO5Linux ♞
To users who love testing out the latest features in newly released Linux distribution, well,
you have reason to smile. Linux Mint 20.3 beta is out and available for the masses to
download and test. This release comes only a few months after the Linux Mint 20.2 “Uma”
release, packaged with many updated software refinements and new and improved features.
The Linux Mint 20.3 stable release is expected to launch around Christmas 2021. According
to the chatter on the internet, that should lay between 18th to 25th December 2021. Additionally,
we know Linux Mint operating systems are based on the LTS versions of Ubuntu, and they release
a new version after every six months (specifically, Linux Mint 20 series is based on Ubuntu 20.04
LTS). This release comes only a few months after the Ubuntu interim releases. By doing
the math and looking at the history of previous releases, Christmas is the best time we can
expect Linux Mint 20.3 stable release.
Key Features in Linux Mint 20.3 So, what can we expect with Linux Mint 20.3?
Well, like with any other Linux release, you can be sure there will be improvements and
updates on the User Interface, system performance, Kernel, and of course, some new additional
features or applications. This post will look at the most striking changes we saw while
working on the beta version that you can expect to find on the final stable release. Let’s
dive in!
1. Cinnamon 5.2 Desktop Environment (Latest) This update comes precisely five and half
months after the Cinnamon 5.0 release. And as you would expect, this new Desktop Environment
comes with some noteworthy visual improvements and features.
Let’s look at some of them in detail.
Cinnamon 5.2 doesn’t include a combo theme that combines dark headers and light windows.
Instead, the Mint-X Theme now applies a common theme for the notification panel and block
styling in Nemo (default file manager), which changes color automatically depending on the
selected mode. You will also notice an improvement in displaying
applications that support their dark interface when working with a light theme. Here, we
are talking of applications like Hypnotix, GNOME terminal, Pix, and several other apps
that allow you to set a dark mode within the application.
Another visual improvement with Cinnamon 5.2 is that the general window layout has changed.
The control buttons have received quite some increase in size, and icons have added spacing
around them, making it much easier to click and navigate. Additionally, the window corners
are now rounded and not 90-degrees sharp as in previous Cinnamon versions.
Cinnamon 5.2 uses a grey color to highlight active elements despite the theme you are
using. You can easily see this by hovering your mouse on the icons on the taskbar.
The calendar applet has also received quite some exciting updates. When you create any
events, they now appear on the applet.
It improved GTK4 support. Cinnamon 5.2 includes an additional setting
to disable Window labels. You can now easily disable scrolling in the
Workspace view applet.
Cinnamon 5.2 includes Python 3.10 support in the menu editor.
You can disable showing the number of all notifications in the notification applet.
The sound applet no longer shows “unknown artist” when playing a song. In addition,
there have been some improvements with the media control buttons and player status labels.
The keyboard applet now shows the correct icon sizes in a vertical panel.
If you are not a big fan of Cinnamon and prefer the other Desktop environments like XFCE or
MATE, you still have a reason to smile. Linux Mint 20.3 XFCE edition ships with Xfce 4.16,
while the Mate edition ships with Mate 1.26.
2. Hypnotix App UI Improvements The fantastic free and open-source IPTV streaming
application – Hypnotix, has also received quite some updates. It features a new set
of flags and now supports Dark Mode by default, and all that gives the app quite an intuitive
user interface. The developers also added a search feature allowing you to look up your
favorite TVs and movies.
3. Thingy (brand new XApp) Accessing and reading Ebooks on Linux Mint
just got better. Linux Mint 20.3 ships with a new XApp named “Thingy.” Thingy is a
Document manager application that organizes your PDFs, displays the recently opened files,
and tracks your overall reading progress. Therefore, when you close and PDF file and
open it tomorrow, it will start from where you left last night.
4. Sticky Notes App UI Improvements Are you constantly scrolling through your
many notes to locate a note you made last week? Well, you don’t have to do that anymore.
The Sticky Notes app now includes a search button allowing you to look up your saved
notes quickly.
Additionally, you will notice that the title is embedded within the note, and you can now
select the text font size.
5. Printing and Scanning Consider yourself lucky if you plan to use
Linux Mint 20.3 for office work, including scanning and printing. This Mint version ships
with HPLIP 3.21.8, which includes support for a range of HP printers and Scanners. If
you cannot get your printer working with the software drivers, you can opt for ipp-usb
and sane-airscan, which were backported and are available in Linux mint 20.3 repositories.
Other Notable Improvements System reports run only once a day and not
every hour like previous versions to save battery usage. Additionally, you can now switch
off Bluetooth from the Bluetooth tray. The Web Apps manager also received some updates.
You can now see the default browser for every web app installed on your system.
When copying a file with the same name as a file in a directory with Nemo, you now have
an added option “rename automatically” instead of the usual Skip/ Ignore present
in previous releases. If you kill the Nemo process, you still access
clipboard contents with this new release. Not like the previous version where clipboard
contents would automatically disappear. This new release Ships with Linux firmware
1.187 and Linux kernel 5.4
Conclusion
This video has given you a hint of the features you can expect to find on the Linux Mint 20.3
“Una” stable release. If you want to test this beta release, please download the ISO
file from any links depending on the Desktop Environment you prefer.
However, we don’t recommend using the Beta release on production. Instead, consider waiting
for a few more days, and the Stable release will be out.
Thanks for watching,
I hope you enjoyed this video,
If you did hit that thumbs up button, it helps me to make good content for you, other then
that, I will see you in tomorrow's video, peace out.