Linux Mint 22.3 gets a Beta release with lots of new features

Linux Mint 22.3 is set to be the next long-term supported release and a Beta is now here you can test, with a surprising amount of new features. It will be supported until 2029.

Hopefully making issues easier to trace, they've upgraded and rebranded the System Reports tool into a new System Information app that gives you four new pages of system details. This includes now pages for System Information, System Reports, Crash Reports, USB, GPU, PCI and BIOS.

Pictured - testing the Linux Mint 22.3 Beta

On top of that there's a new System Administration tool included, which has a boot menu configuration page available.

There's plenty of additions to themes as well wth a new XApp Symbolic Icons (XSI) set to give application developers (and the Mint team) a set of standard application icons. They said it was made due to GNOME's Adwaita no longer supporting applications outside of GNOME. And with this now available all XApp, Cinnamon, and Linux Mint projects have since migrated to XSI.

Cinnamon Desktop 6.6 is a big one too. There's improvements to keyboard layout support, with keyboard layouts being fully Wayland compatible now too. Another upgrade is the brand new Cinnamon Menu with a modern layout and different layout options.

The file manager Nemo also got improved thumbnail support, a template manager and better search accuracy.

Even the window list had a nice tweak to show notification badges for when you miss things. There's plenty more to see in the blog post announcement and release highlights page.

According to the latest Steam survey, Linux Mint accounts for around 9.32% of all Linux gamers on Steam.