The team behind Linux Mint has released beta ISOs for Linux Mint 19.2. The new betas come in three flavours, Cinnamon, MATE, and Xfce. There are many common updates to them all such as changes to the update manager, XApps, and new wallpapers but each update got unique changes for their particular desktop environment too.
With Linux Mint 19.2, users will get a new and improved update manager which aims to help users manage their systems. For example, it'll let users know if the system needs to be restarted after a kernel update and it’ll show a warning 90 days before your version of Linux Mint reaches end-of-life. This will give you time to comfortably upgrade to a new edition and get relatives and friends upgraded if you help manage their systems too.
If you dual boot Windows and Linux Mint and have experienced issues booting into either system, the new version of Mint comes with the Boot Repair tool installed on the ISO meaning you can use it from your install or the USB live media. According to the Linux Mint team, the Boot Repair tool should fix most boot configuration problems.
In terms of aesthetics, this release includes 22 new wallpapers in case you want to switch up the appearance of your desktop. Additionally, the Mint-Y theme got some contrast improvements following “heavy scrutiny” and the default font was switched from Noto to the Ubuntu fonts.
Mint 19.2 makes Cinnamon significantly less RAM intensive, thus freeing up extra memory for your other applications. If you install Flatpak versions of apps that you've already installed from the default repositories, Cinnamon will reflect this by showing both programs in the menu but the Flatpak version will have ‘(Flatpak)’ in the title too.
With MATE 1.22, Mint now supports Metacity-3 themes, the window and desktop switchers have been improved visually, and you can configure the delay for automatically started applications. That’s not all the tweaks included in this update but they’re the biggest changes that have been made.
You can find out more information, and the download links, for each version at the following locations: Cinnamon edition, MATE edition, Xfce edition.
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