Following a two-week beta phase, the team behind Linux Mint has announced the final release of Linux Mint 19.2. Three editions of the release are available and include the Cinnamon desktop, MATE desktop, and the Xfce desktop. Cinnamon is the main edition while Xfce is oriented toward less powerful computers. MATE is good for those people who prefer the more traditional GNOME 2 experience.
The Cinnamon edition ships with Cinnamon 4.2 which comes with better performance, improved handling of Flatpaks in menus, updated scroll bar settings, better Samba support, and file pinning. The MATE edition comes with MATE 1.22 which brings improved stability and bug fixes, support for metacity-3 themes, better systemd support, desktop notifications for long-running file operations, and a handful of other small tweaks that add a bit of polish to the desktop experience. The Xfce edition ships with Xfce 4.12 which is the same as what shipped in Linux Mint 19.1 so you shouldn’t see much difference with this edition.
There are several changes that apply to all of the editions. The Update Manager now handles kernels better, users can see how long kernel are supported for, you can queue multiple kernels for installation and removal, rather than one by one, and a remove kernels button was added to remove old kernels quickly. There are some other nice additions in the Update Manager such as 90-day warnings before your Linux Mint version expires giving you time to upgrade.
Other changes include XApps improvements, the addition of the Boot-Repair tool to ISO images making it easy to fix boot configuration issues, and theming improvements for better readability. Finally, 22 new wallpapers were added, as is customary, giving you the option to further refresh the look of your desktop.
If you’d like to download the newest version of Linux Mint, head on over to the project website and follow the links through to the edition you’d like to download. If you are planning to upgrade from an older version of Linux Mint, an upgrade path will be made available shortly.
Update: The upgrade path is now open, find out how to upgrade on the Linux Mint blog.