The Linux Mint team has just released Linux Mint 22, a new major version of the free Linux distribution. With Windows 10’s end of support coming up quickly next year, at least some users may consider making the switch to Linux.
While there are other options, paying Microsoft for extended support or upgrading to Windows 11, these options are not available for all users or desirable.
Linux Mint 22 is a long-term service release. Means, it is supported until 2029. Unlike Microsoft, which made drastic changes to the system requirements of Windows 11 to lock out millions of devices from upgrading to the new version, Linux Mint will continue to work on older hardware, even after 2029.
Here are the core changes in Linux Mint 22:
- Based on the new Ubuntu 24.04 package base.
- Kernel version is 6.8.
- Software Manager loads faster and has improved multi-threading.
- Unverified Flatpaks are disabled by default.
- Preinstalled Matrix Web App for using chat networks.
- Improved language support removes any language not selected by the user after installation to save disk space.
- Several under-the-hood changes that update libraries or software.
Switched to Linux Mint about three years ago after being unable to take my perfectly good laptop from W10 to W11. Dual boot firstly, quickly becoming entirely Mint. It just worked. It was the first Linux distro I’d tried in about 20 years that I didn’t mess up in a week or so.
Recently bought a new laptop and decided to distro hop. Tried various flavours of Fedora, and a few others, but ultimately came back to Mint. None of the others worked quite as well as Mint does for me (though I really liked KDE Plasma, and Gnome surprised me once I finally discovered extensions!)
You can put Plasma on Mint, I’m running that right now myself
When I rebuilt my PC I was planning something similar, got two nvme drives to dual boot, but started with Linux Mint… And never wound up installing Windows on the other, never felt the need, so I finally last night formatted it for more room for all my games
I did try running Plasma on Mint, but it was never quite as good as on Fedora or as smooth on Mint as Cinnamon.
Honestly, I think I just like the simple uniformity of Cinnamon. It’s dull and predicable, but really, really solid.
I really liked Cinnamon but switched mainly because I kept having occasional video problems that didn’t seem to affect KDE… But, that might have been the lack of a proper video driver, I’ve not tried switching back since fixing that
At this point, I’ve found enough with KDE that I like having in my workflow that I’ve been reluctant to try switching back