 Linux Mint just released a brand new version, version 21.2 codenamed Victoria. This is a long-term support release for Linux Mint, so if you install 21.2, you will receive support up until the year 2027. What I'm going to do is I'm going to take a quick first look at Linux Mint 21.2 in a virtual machine. I'm going to take a look at the Cinnamon Edition. I'm not going to cover the installation of Linux Mint because the install process for this version of Linux Mint is pretty much the same as the previous version of Linux Mint, but I will cover some of the changes for this version. One of the things is their LightDM login manager, which uses the slick greeter theme, now has support for changing your keyboard layouts. You can see we've got this little widget here. If I go to more layouts, I get a very lengthy list of all the keyboard layouts that I could switch to. Some of the other things they've worked on are the accessibility options here. You've got the accessibility icon here, and it lists the on-screen keyboard, high contrast, and screen reader. We also have this neat little feature now where if I'm typing my super secure password in the login manager, I can actually go back and in the middle of the word start typing where before I think you had to erase the entire word. Now you also have this little reveal icon. For example, if I wasn't sure, if I type my super secure password, I could click the I icon there and reveal it. Now I don't mind you guys seeing this because that is actually not my real password. My real super secure password is something completely different. You'd never guess it. When you first log into the Cinnamon desktop environment, it's the same Cinnamon desktop that you're familiar with. It's also the same welcome greeter here. We're welcome to Linux Mint. We get some information about the distribution, some first steps, where we can do some basic settings such as setting our desktop colors. If I launch this and we can set our theme. For example, I like the dark theme rather than the default mix theme. If you prefer a light theme, of course you could switch to that, but I'm going to go to the dark theme. As far as accent colors, I'm cool with pretty much anything. Obviously, Linux Mint. Let's go with green for the accent colors and close that. We have system snapshots, which of course will launch TimeShift. TimeShift takes a system snapshot of your installed packages. That way, if you do a system update, so you launch the software center and do an update. And for some reason that update breaks your installation. You can always roll back to a previous snapshot, a previous working version of your installation. I'm actually not going to go ahead and take a snapshot. So I'm going to close that. So this is TimeShift, but it's pretty easy to create a snapshot. You can even set it up to where it takes snapshots for you on a daily basis, weekly basis, monthly basis, whatever it needs to be. We have our driver manager. So this is for device drivers, especially proprietary drivers for your Wi-Fi, for your video cards and things like that. This is very nice that they put this right here in the welcome screen. Now, because I am doing this on a virtual machine, it's not really going to find any proprietary drivers that I need because all the drivers for this VM, of course, are open source. So it didn't have anything to do there. But if you were doing this on physical equipment, chances are it's going to find some important drivers that need to be installed for you to actually have a nice fully functional desktop experience. We also have quick launchers to the update manager. Now, I just installed this brand new version of Linux Mint. There's probably not many updates to take. We have the system settings. So this is essentially you can think of this as like your control panel. And this is where you can do things like play with the backgrounds, which, you know, the same Linux Mint wallpapers I think we've seen before. It doesn't look like anything new. Well, we do have Victoria. We have this category here. So this is the Victoria wallpapers. And these are new. And these are actually quite nice. For a dark theme, I probably want a light wallpaper. And I got to say, I kind of like that. Yeah, I could dig that this is a rose and this is fireworks. There's another one really light wallpaper that would work nicely against a dark theme. Yeah, this wallpaper pack actually is very nice. Some little abstract art there. I think I'm going to go back to this one, this picture of Greece. Yeah, I'll leave that for my background. We also have our software manager, which they did work on the software center here. So let's take a second. So generating the cash is basically doing a pseudo apt update. So it's syncing the mirrors. And it finished syncing that took about, I don't know, 30 seconds, maybe 60 seconds that very first time launching the software center. But you can see it is a very attractive software center. If I make it full screen, you can see we've got some nice artwork here, the header and featured applications, which includes some popular proprietary software such as Sublime and Dropbox as well as some for an open source software such as FileZilla and Virtual Box. So they spent a lot of time working on the UI design. I got to say, this is a sexy software manager. One of the other things is they also integrate flat pack support. So I'm assuming since they mentioned discord, discord is a flat pack, you can see install it will install it from flat hub being proprietary software discord will not be in the Debian repositories or the Ubuntu repositories, which Linux mint bases off of those distributions. So it makes sense to install discord as a flatback. And just to verify this works, I'm actually going to click the install button click continue. And then I'm just going to see if after installation, we can actually launch discord. One thing I should have considered before installing discord is the fact that it takes it said it takes three gigabytes of space to install discord. So I didn't realize it was that big of a program inside this virtual machine. I'm kind of limited on space, but it finished the installation. And let's try to launch it. Let's see if the flat pack launches correctly. And it looks like it's going to launch just fine. So their flat pack integration into the software center is working. And the reason I wanted to check that is because I have played with some distributions that enable things like flat packs, snaps, even some distributions that ship app images and things like that. And sometimes those things don't really work out of the box the way you expect them to. But in this case, it looks like discord launches just fine. So let's close that finally in the first steps section of the welcome screen, we have our firewall as well. If I launch that that should be a GUFW, which is the GUI front end to UFW, the uncomplicated firewall is pretty simple program to use if you're familiar with firewalls. If you have the need for a firewall program, other than that, the welcome application also includes some important documentation. It has links to various help forums. You have the web forms as well as the IRC chat room. And you have a tab here for how you can contribute to the Linux Mint project. And we have the toggle button here that checkbox show this dialogue at startup. Now that I've seen it the first time, I don't need to ever see this again. So I'm just going to toggle that off. So that welcome application no longer auto starts every time I log in. One of the other new things for this version of Linux Mint is their pics application. So if I go under graphics into pics, now this is an image viewer image manager. And this is based on the G thumb program. And before their previous version of pics was based on G thumb 3.2, the 3.2 series, which is kind of an older version of G thumb. Now they've rebased it on a newer version of G thumb, which is the 3.12 series. And the older version had traditional menus, you had your file edit and all of that, you had your standard kind of GTK three kind of program, where now you've got this simpler kind of cleaner look with the header bar here with the buttons on the left and the right, as well as the hamburger menu that you can get into. Now as far as is this a major change? No, it's just a UI change. I will say that it does look a little cleaner having this all consolidated in that top header bar. They've also spent some time working on their icons. And there's several different colors of the icon set that you can change to. So if I actually go into the system settings, let's see, let's play around with the icon set. So I'm going to go into themes. And in this screen here, I'm going to click the tab that says themes. That is a little unintuitive, by the way. This is just a minor gripe because every time I take a look at Linux men, it's always a few months in between different versions. And I always struggle with this screen because I assume that, you know, it should show me the different themes that I could switch to. But we have this, these tabs here, but we don't really have a tab for the main page. It's weird because how would I get back to the very first part of the themes? Yeah, it's strange that they don't have four tabs here instead of just three. But anyway, I'm going to click on the icons here. And if I do some of the other icons, for example, the blue icon set, you can see these are really nice icon sets. There's the pink icon set and the purple icon set. Yeah, I really love these really simple two tone icon sets that they're working with here. For me, I'm going to go back to the default, the mint Y icon set, these green icons, those are, they're kind of minimalist, but they're also really attractive. Let's talk about some of the updated program versions here in this version of Linux Mint. If I do a search for Firefox, which of course is the default browser, let's see what version of Firefox we are on with this version. So I'm going to go to help about Firefox. And this is Firefox 115.0.2. If I do a control T to bring up the terminal, and let me go ahead and make the terminal full screen, let's zoom in. Let's do a uname dash R to get the kernel version. We're on 5.15. So that's a LTS kernel. That's the LTS kernel from the last Ubuntu LTS, which of course Linux Mint bases off of. If you're interested in how many programs are installed on Linux Mint, we could do apt list space dash dash installed and get a list of all the programs that were installed via the apt package manager. If I up arrow and pipe all of that into the WC program space dash L, WC is the word count program dash L gives us a line count rather than a word count. And we have 2158 packages installed via the apt package manager. If I do a flat pack list, because flat packs are installed, you can see there are no flat packs installed other than some basic like GTK themes other than that discord, which I installed myself. So flat packs are enabled by default, but they really don't install anything as a flat pack by default. And of course, Linux Mint a couple of versions ago made the decision to really just strip out everything snap related from the distribution. You can see snap D is not installed. So snap list doesn't do anything. But if you wanted to, you could quickly enable snap support on Linux Mint. It's as easy as doing a sudo apt install snap D and then rebooting the system and then away you go install all the snap packs that you want. As far as the audio server, I believe Linux Mint has already switched to pipe wire to verify this to verify that any program is installed on a Linux system at the terminal. All you need to do is where is all one word and then name of the program. So I'll do pipe wire. And if it's installed, it should give you the location to the pipe wire binary user bin pipe wire. So pipe wire is installed. It'll also give you the location to some libraries such as user share pipe wire as well as the location to the man page for the program as well if it's available. So that's some of the changes here in this version of Linux Mint 21.2. Now not much has changed. It's pretty much the same Linux Mint you know and love. It's the same cinnamon desktop environment, very minor changes. And as far as the suite of applications, it's the same programs from the previous version as well. I already mentioned the installation programs, the same installation process is the same. So if you're one of those people that are a big fan of Linux Mint, you absolutely love Linux Mint. Give Linux Mint 21.2 a try because it's just more of the same. Now before I go, I need to thank a few special people. I need to thank the producers of this episode. Gabe James Matt Paul, Royal West Armored Dragon, Commander Ingrid George, Lee Methos, Nate Erion, Paul Pease, Archon Fodor, Realities4Less, Red Prophet Roland, Soulastry, ToolsDevlar, Wargent2 and Ubuntu and Willie. These guys. They're my highest tiered patrons over on Patreon without these guys. This quick look at Linux Mint 21.2 would not have been possible. The show is also brought to you by each and every one of these fine ladies and gentlemen. All these names you're seeing on the screen right now. These are all my supporters over on Patreon without these guys. I couldn't do what I do. If you want to see more videos about Linux and friend open source software, subscribe to DistroTube over on Patreon. Peace.