Linux Mint 21.1 Vera with Cinnamon 5.6 desktop environment is out

Linux Mint 21.1 has been released. The release is called Vera and comes with the Cinnamon 5.6 desktop. There are no major changes, but the colors and the rest of the UI have been improved.

Linux Mint 21.1 Vera is based on Ubuntu 22.04 LTS and the underlying Linux 5.15 LTS kernel. The main innovation in Mint 21.1 is the Cinnamon 5.6 desktop environment. In addition, versions are available for download that use Xfce 4.16 and MATE 1.26 as environments. The long term support release of Vera will be supported until 2027.

The Cinnamon 5.6 release is not a radical refresh, but it has many small changes that, according to the developers, should give the operating system a more modern look. For example, the colors have become sharper and many accent colors have disappeared from the menus. It is particularly striking that the characteristic green color is no longer standard; the makers make Aqua the default color in the OS. Small elements such as icons and mouse arrows have also changed.

In addition, the developers have changed things under the hood. For example, driver management can now be done without a password and there is offline support for this. There is also support for Debconf and Nvidia users can now enable secure boot.

Mint Vera gets full integration for Flatpak applications. Key management for PPA packages has also been improved in Software Sources, as apt-keys will eventually be phased out in the distro. The makers say users will be able to upgrade to 21.1 until 2024. Only then is a new codebase written for the OS.