It’s the start of the month which means the Linux Mint team has shared what it has 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 an issue with secure boot and for the time being, new installs should be done with secure boot disabled.
No ETA for the release of Linux Mint 21.2 and LMDE 6 has been published yet but they will release quite close to one another. LMDE is short for Linux Mint Debian Edition and a new one comes along following a major Debian release. Debian 12 is due in June so LMDE 6 should follow hot on its heels.
According to the blog post, LMDE 6 will come out after Linux Mint 21.2 so we sort of get a rough estimate of the release time - somewhere around June. Linux Mint releases usually come after a 2-week beta period, so we’ll hear about that first.
In recent years, the Mint team has been quite preoccupied with modernizing the Cinnamon desktop used by default in Linux Mint. This month, the company has decided to show off new tooltips and notifications that use the accent colours you’ve chosen. They are quite full-on and will definitely grate some people. Based on the comments section of the blog, some visually-impaired users already do not like the decision. They say the text is too difficult to read.
One of the users that complained about the new notifications and tooltips suggested that they should be optional. This would be a good enhancement as it would give users more control over their desktops. Only time will tell if that gets implemented.
Finally, for anyone out there who is planning to install Linux Mint, it’s recommended to turn off secure boot. It seems Canonical updated Ubuntu’s shim-signed package that enables secure boot and now Ubuntu derivatives aren’t working with secure boot. The Linux Mint team is working on a fix for future ISOs but for now, just disable secure boot.