The team at Linux Mint have released the next major version, Linux Mint 22, bringing a number of significant changes and improvements.

Project lead Clément (Clem) Lefèbvre made the announcement Thursday morning, following a longer-than-usual beta phase for the new release. The extra work comes largely from the move to a new base, the latest release of Canonical’s Ubuntu, as well as some additional work to implement new features and ensure consistency.

Ubuntu 24.04 Base

One of the biggest benefits of the new Linux Mint 22 is the updated Ubuntu 24.04 base. This means the software and repos are much more current than what is included in Linux Mint 21, which is based on Ubuntu 22.04.

Because Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu’s LTS releases, Linux Mint 22 will be supported until 2029.

Improved Kernel Cadence

One of the criticisms leveled against Linux Mint is that it has always been very conservative with kernel updates. For example, the default kernel on Linux Mint 21 is 5.15.x, despite 6.10 recently being released. While users could use the Update Manager to switch to a new kernel, the default was still 5.15. As a result, unless users opted for the “Edge” edition, which defaulted to a newer kernel OOTB, the mainline Linux Mint often had issues on newer hardware, not even installing in some cases.

With Linux Mint 22, the team is going to follow Ubuntu’s HWE kernel. In other words, when Ubuntu releases updates every six months, the team backports the kernel to the previous LTS release. In other words, when Ubuntu 24.10 is released, it will ship with a newer kernel than Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. Ubuntu’s developers will backport that newer kernel to 24.04, however, ensuring that LTS users benefit from the latest improvements.

Clem says that Linux Mint will adopt the HWE kernel beginning with 22, meaning Linux Mint age far more gracefully over the next couple of years until version 23 comes out.

Pipewire

One of the biggest improvements involves the sound server, with Mint 22 making the move from PulseAudio to Pipewire, thanks to the underlying base.

Pipewire is vastly superior to PulseAudio, especially for content creators and those who regularly work with audio.

See Also: Linux Mint vs LMDE: Which Should You Choose?

Software Manager and Flatpaks

The Software Manager received a major performance improvement, now opening almost instantly, as opposed to the several seconds it used to take.

In addition, the Software Manager hides unverified Flatpaks by default, although experienced users can enable them.

Language Support

The Mint team has improved the installation process to remove preinstalled language packs that are not needed. By default, English and whatever language the user has selected will be installed. All others will be removed at the end of the installation process, saving “a significant amount of disk space.”

GTK4 Issues

GTK is the visual toolkit that Linux Mint’s desktop environments are based on. Unfortunately, GTK is largely maintained by the GNOME developers, with many recent changes in GTK4 aimed almost exclusively at apps designed for GNOME. One such technology is the GTK4 libAdwaita GUI library, which severely limits the ability to theme an app.

As a result, while Mint’s themes were updated to support GTK4, several applications have been removed or backported to their GTK3 version because of visual incompatibility between the app’s libAdwaita appearance and Mint’s appearance and ability to be themed.

Clem outlines which apps are impacted:

As a result, the GNOME Font Viewer was removed and the following applications were downgraded back to GTK3 versions: Celluloid, GNOME Calculator, Simple Scan, Baobab, System Monitor, GNOME Calendar, File Roller, Zenity.

Similarly, the Linux Mint team has forked the Gnome Online Accounts as a result of changes upstream, as Clem details:

With GNOME 46, libgoa/libgoa-backend 3.50 moved to GTK4 and could no longer be used by GTK3 applications. This meant that Online Accounts support had to disappear from Cinnamon, Budgie and Unity. The XApp project implemented a standalone application called “GNOME Online Accounts GTK”. Not only did this bring the feature back in these three desktop environments, it also made it possible for it to be used in MATE and Xfce.

De-Snapification

Ubuntu has been moving increasingly toward its Snap packaging format. Firefox and Chrome were already bundled as a Snap rather than the traditional DEB package. In Ubuntu 24.04, Thunderbird joins the list of Snapified apps.

Since Linux Mint does not include Snaps, the team is taking it upon themselves to bundle Thunderbird as a traditional DEB file.

Misc Improvements

There are a number of other improvements, including the following:

• JXL support was added to Pix and a new thumbnailer was implemented for it.
• The Software Sources received support for the new Debian DEB822 format.
• All software using libsoup2 was migrated to libsoup3.
• HiDPI support improvements were made in the boot sequence, in Plymouth and Slick-Greeter.

The Future

Linux Mint clearly has some challenges ahead, from both its Ubuntu base, as well its reliance on GTK for its GUI toolkit.

Ubuntu Challenges

While Snaps are an excellent option for server environments, Ubuntu’s insistence on using them in the desktop space will continue to pose an issue for the Linux Mint developers.

The team already has to package and maintain DEB versions of Firefox, Chrome, and Thunderbird. It’s believed that Ubuntu will move the CUPS printing stack to Snap in Ubuntu 24.10. Because Mint is based on the Ubuntu LTS releases—meaning Mint won’t rebase until Ubuntu 26.04—that change won’t have an immediate impact on the distro. Nonetheless, the writing is on the wall: If Mint continues to be based on Ubuntu, the team will have to continue to take on the work of packaging and maintaining the various parts of the system that Ubuntu Snapifies.

Clem has previously stated he doesn’t believe Snap will be around for the long haul and will instead join the list of technologies Canonical has tried to push and ultimately abandoned.

Realistically though I don’t think Snap will last forever. I see it getting abandoned just like Mir or Unity when it fails to get the traction and return on investment Canonical wants from it.

Clem may well be right. Canonical has invested a lot of money in making Snap a universal packing format beyond just Ubuntu. Unfortunately for the company, outside of the server space, the wider Linux community has very little interest in adopting Snaps and prefer its competitor, Flatpak. In fact, even some distros that did support Snap have opted to drop support.

Only time will tell if Clem is right. If he is wrong, however, undoing Ubuntu’s decisions may eventually result in such an increased workload that making the backup Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) the new mainline offering may be unavoidable.

GTK4/GNOME Challenges

The Linux Mint team clearly has fundamental differences of opinion about how desktop environments and apps should behave. GNOME wasn’t a very macOS-like unified look, with very little customization. In contrast, Linux Mint’s developers believe users should be able to customize and theme their desktops and apps while still providing a consistent experience.

Because GNOME dominates GTK development, it does not bode well for non-GNOME desktop environments that rely on GTK. This is why Budgie has been trying to move away from GTK, and System76 decided to build their own desktop environment for Pop!_OS based on Rust.

All three of Linux Mint’s desktops (flagship Cinnamon, Xfce, and Mate) are all GTK-based, meaning the project is heavily invested in the toolkit. Nonetheless, the issues GTK4 has caused for non-GNOME desktops is only going to get worse as the project moves toward GTK5 and beyond.

As a result, the Mint devs will need to come up with a long-term solution. This could involve adding a library to GTK4 that enables better integration with non-GNOME desktops, or even using a maintained fork of GTK3.

Clem mentioned both possibilities in a response to a user comment in the April blog post:

We fully support GTK4 apps but we’re not migrating to it.

It took a decade for GTK3 to be stable, we want to enjoy it for a while. Many widgets we’re using in GTK3 no longer exist in GTK4 so the migration isn’t easy and could force the loss of features or layout changes in some applications. GTK4 probably needs a library to make it complete and easy to use, a libAdwaita for generic apps really. But nobody made one so far, assuming they ever will. Long term we don’t know if GTK will continue to support themes or even Xorg. Some GTK users moved to Qt or other toolkits. Some are looking at GTK3 forks. Some are thinking of making a GTK4 lib. And some like us, are just happy to stay on GTK3 until there’s more visibility going forward.

Whatever option the Mint team chooses, it’s a safe bet they will approach the challenge with the same careful, measured consideration they have shown with previous issues.

Conclusion

Overall, Linux Mint 22 is shaping up to be one of the best releases of the venerable Linux distro in years. While the project certainly has some challenges ahead of it, the team is well-positioned to address those challenges and continue to deliver one of the preeminent Linux experiences.