Linux Mint 22.2 "Zara" has been officially released today, bringing with it plenty of enhancements across the board to the popular Linux distro.
Arriving with Linux kernel 6.14, being built on top of Ubuntu 24.04 ("Noble"). As a long-term support release you'll be able to easily use it until 2029, with new Mint versions using the same base packages to make upgrades even easier until then.
Pictured - Linux Mint 22.2
Not much has changed from the Beta reported previously on GamingOnLinux, apart from ensuring it's as stable as possible. As a reminder of some new bits:
- Sticky notes supported with Wayland.
- Revamped login screen styling to look better.
- Hypnotix video player has two new viewing modes and performance improvements. It will also prevent your system sleeping while playing videos.
- A brand new XApp called Fingwit dedicated to fingerprint authentication.
- LibAdwaita was patched to work with themes. Also forked into LibAdapta for adding new features.
- XDG Desktop Portal XApp now supports accent colours.
- Various other improvements to XApps:
- In Xviewer, the EDID-based color correction is now configurable and disabled by default. This feature was counter-intuitive and conflicted with the color management handled at hardware and desktop level.
- A new thumbnailer was written for cover art in .aiff audio files: xapp-aiff-thumbnailer.
- An iOS version of Warpinator is available.
- In the WebApp Manager, the webapp description field is now editable.
- When renaming multiple files and using enumerations, it is now possible to use leading zeros, define the starting number of the enumeration and its increment step.
- The last renaming operation is also remembered and pre-selected.
- A few tweaks to the colouring in the default Linux Mint theme.
- The Software Manager welcome screen was improved, and the app explains the different between Flatpak and system packages.
Check out the announcement and what's new pages for more.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
About the author - Liam Dawe
I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly checked on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly.
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Linux_Rocks 4 Sep 2025
Seeing that Linux Mint screenshot really makes me miss my gaming PC. D:
2 Likes
TheRiddick 4 Sep 2025
I know a lot of people use Mint so if they can double down and speed along the development of wayland support the better.
3 Likes
That would be good, yes. I don't notice a lot of mentions of Wayland in this release, but I suppose where we could expect to see more of that would be the next .0 release, not this .2 LTS, which we can expect to be fairly conservative.
I'll probably upgrade to this at some point but I'm not going to rush . . . what I have now is fine for the moment.
I'll probably upgrade to this at some point but I'm not going to rush . . . what I have now is fine for the moment.
1 Likes
i did the upgrade and it was surprisingly quick with no discernible changes to anything on my system. Even had to check the version number to see if it had actually upgraded 
I suppose that's a good thing
I suppose that's a good thing
4 Likes
Last time I checked they were targeting 23.0 for fully functional Wayland session. So, in about a year.
2 Likes
This version seems to be heading in the right direction. I'm still looking forward as well for wayland, and for the new release of LMDE. I'm hesitating between xubuntu 24.04 or 25.10 for the perf along with cachyos, and mint 22.2 or LMDE 7 later for use and feel.
0 Likes
They did mention work on Wayland in the monthly posts so the work is happening under the hood but isn't a user-visible feature so not worth getting too much into it on a post about the new release.
I know the've rebased muffin on a newer version of mutter and reduced the amount of patches they need to carry around so it will be easier to rebase again when necessary for full wayland support
They've also been hacking at a better support for GTK 4/5 apps, which is where the need for a themeable fork of LibAdwaita comes from...
...and in turn the GTK 4/5 apps blending nicely in Mint enables them to offer more recent versions of Gnome apps in Mint repos (without disruption to their userbase from broken theming and etc which LibAdwaita does cause) so these can reflect recent upstream work on those apps for wayland support too
All in all they did what one would expect a small derivate distro dev team to do which is hitch a ride on upstream work as much as possible but also did this in the way Mint users expect those things to happen: under the hood, without significantly turning UI/UX upside down, not even just this once or just temporarily
Which is why all my family's PCs have Mint installed despite it always being 2 and a half years late to every party (it's based on Ubuntu LTS which releases every 2 years, and adds roughly 5 more months of delay to reach users whenever a new Ubuntu LTS is released, to rebase Mint's own stuff onto it)
Last edited by Marlock on 9 Sep 2025 at 9:15 pm UTC
I know the've rebased muffin on a newer version of mutter and reduced the amount of patches they need to carry around so it will be easier to rebase again when necessary for full wayland support
They've also been hacking at a better support for GTK 4/5 apps, which is where the need for a themeable fork of LibAdwaita comes from...
...and in turn the GTK 4/5 apps blending nicely in Mint enables them to offer more recent versions of Gnome apps in Mint repos (without disruption to their userbase from broken theming and etc which LibAdwaita does cause) so these can reflect recent upstream work on those apps for wayland support too
All in all they did what one would expect a small derivate distro dev team to do which is hitch a ride on upstream work as much as possible but also did this in the way Mint users expect those things to happen: under the hood, without significantly turning UI/UX upside down, not even just this once or just temporarily
Which is why all my family's PCs have Mint installed despite it always being 2 and a half years late to every party (it's based on Ubuntu LTS which releases every 2 years, and adds roughly 5 more months of delay to reach users whenever a new Ubuntu LTS is released, to rebase Mint's own stuff onto it)
Last edited by Marlock on 9 Sep 2025 at 9:15 pm UTC
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