It’s the start of the month which means the Linux Mint team has done what they’ve been working on. This month it showed off some new notification and tooltip themes and explained a bit about the release schedule. It was also announced that there was a problem with secure boot and currently, a fresh install should be done with secure boot disabled.
No ETA has yet been published for the release of Linux Mint 21.2 and LMDE 6 but they will be released very close to each other. LMDE is short for Linux Mint Debian Edition and comes after a major Debian release. Debian 12 is due in June so LMDE 6 should be hot on its heels.
According to Blog post, LMDE 6 will come out after Linux Mint 21.2 so we can estimate the release time – somewhere around June. Linux Mint releases usually come after a 2-week beta period, so we’ll hear about it first.
In recent years, the Mint team has been very busy modernizing the Cinnamon desktop used by default in Linux Mint. This month, the company decided to show new tooltips and notifications that use the accent colors you choose. They are quite filling and will definitely thank a few people. Based on the comments section of the blog, some visually impaired users already don’t like the decision. They say that reading the text is very difficult.
One of the users complaining about the new notifications and tooltips suggested they should be optional. This would be a nice addition as it would give users more control over their desktops. Time will tell if this is implemented.
Finally, for anyone out there thinking of installing Linux Mint, it is recommended to turn off secure boot. It seems that canonical updated Ubuntu has a sham-signed package that enables secure boot and now Ubuntu derivatives don’t work with secure boot. The Linux Mint team is working on a solution for future ISOs but for now, just disable secure boot.
