According to the Linux Mint Community’s ISO Images page, the stable editions of Linux Mint 20 have been tested and are now approved for release. The Linux Mint team has still not updated the main website with any information but it’s expected it will do so over the coming days. Although no announcement has yet been made by the Mint team, some mirrors, including Bytemark’s are already giving access to the ISOs.
In terms of new features, Linux Mint 20 includes the following:
- The Linux 5.4 kernel, which brings new hardware support
- Inclusion of the Warpinator local network file transfer tool
- LibreOffice has been upgraded to the 6.4 branch
- There’s a large selection of new wallpapers to choose from
- HiDPI support for System Tray icons
- Cinnamon 4.6 has better multi-monitor support
- Better support for NVIDIA Optimus
In one of its recent blog posts, the Linux Mint team announced that software that relies on snapd will no longer be available for download from within the Linux Mint Software Manager. It said it had taken this decision because Canonical, the firm behind snapd, said it would never make the package a dependency for software in its repos but it has since gone back on this and requires its installation for some programs such as Chromium. Instead, the Software Manager will try to link people to where they can download the software manually.
Despite Linux Mint 20"s imminent release, users on Linux Mint 18.x or Linux Mint 19.x will not yet need to upgrade their systems. Linux Mint 18.x is supported until next April and Linux Mint 19.x is supported until April 2023. Linux Mint 20 will receive updates until 2025.
Update: Linux Mint 20 has officially been released to the general public, head on over to the Linux Mint website to download it.