Linux Mint 22 Review: A Deep Dive Into This Minty Fresh Distro

[0:00] Linux Mint 22 was released recently, and this was a major version release. And by that, I mean it’s not just a typical point release with incremental improvements, but instead, this is a full system update. Mint does these kinds of updates once every two years. And I decided I’m going to give it a shot and review it here on this channel. And now that I think about it, it might be the first time I’ve ever done a full review of a distro on this channel.

[0:27] Hmm. I mean, I have done them before on my podcast, Destination Linux, but this might be the first time I’ve done it here.

[0:37] Anyway, I think you’ll find something valuable to take from this video, whether you’re a beginner, a power user, or even a Mint developer. So let’s do it. If you are new to Linux and are watching this to find out if you should give it a try, well then the short answer is yes. Linux Mint is a solid distro for beginners because of the Ubuntu base and the interface it offers should feel very familiar to you if you’re coming from Windows. It is one of the top distros that I recommend for beginners. If you want to know what the other best beginner-friendly distros are, well, I made a video on that specifically, so check the description. Linux Mint 22 is built on top of Ubuntu 24.04, which means it’s going to inherit a lot of value from that base, including significant updates to the underlying packages, tooling, libraries, and core technologies. It comes with a lot of great improvements from previous versions, such as the introduction of PipeWire as the default sound server, replacing PulseAudio. PulseAudio is good, but this is very cool because PipeWire offers lower latency, better performance, professional level features for supporting lots of hardware, and better compatibility with a larger range of Bluetooth devices.

[1:50] Applications, and online services. The best part about PipeWire though, other than all the stuff I just mentioned, is that it is a drop-in replacement, meaning you won’t even be able to tell anything has changed. Your computer’s sound system will continue to work just like it always did, but now.

[2:10] It can also do a lot more and do it better. So check out the interview we had with the creator of PipeWire on my podcast Destination Linux if you’d like to learn more about PipeWire and how it works. Another big change with this release is Mint 22 will be implementing Ubuntu’s

[2:27] Hardware Enablement stack (HWE). So future releases will include updates to the Linux kernel and more, much more frequently. You see, Linux Mint being based on Ubuntu LTS means they would only make big releases once every two years, and only these releases would contain improvements to the hardware support. The way it used to work was that Linux Mint users had to wait two years for those hardware updates or manually apply them themselves, and that’s not necessarily the greatest thing to do. And if you had hardware that wasn’t supported by the major release of Mint at the time, then you simply couldn’t use that hardware unless you figured it out yourself, and in some cases you couldn’t even use Mint at all. Now thanks to Ubuntu’s Hardware Enablement stack (HWE), this shouldn’t be a problem anymore. Linux Mint should receive hardware support updates at least at the same pace of Ubuntu, which is every six months. Some don’t think that’s fast enough, but, and I can kind of agree, but six months is still better than two years.

[3:32] On the app side of things, this version of Linux Mint also introduces a new online accounts app to offer integrations with various online services, such as Google or NextCloud or Microsoft 365. Or if you have some kind of self-hosted email account, you can do that and many more. And Linux Mint 22 also improved their web app system, which I’m a big fan of. And for those that don’t know, this essentially lets you make a standalone app in your main menu launcher of any website that you want to. This is especially helpful for someone like me who wants to be logged into two different YouTube channels at the same time. For example, this channel and the Destination Linux podcast. Of course, this would also be good for multiple social media accounts, or maybe you have a service that you use every day that you just want to make into a web app and have it easy access on your system. You can do that. And the The biggest change here on this particular release is that Mint 22 is now hiding the top toolbars on these web apps by default, which I like a lot because some web apps have all of the interactions right there and you don’t need the toolbar. So it just kind of gets in the way. But I also like how you can enable the browser toolbar if you want to. I’m a big fan of the web app system in Mint and it just got better in Mint 22.

[4:57] Speaking of web apps, Mint 22 comes with one pre-installed for Matrix using the Element client. No, this is not a pre-installed copy of the Matrix movie, even though that would be awesome. But rather, this is a replacement for HexChat for real-time chat support. So you can use this to get support directly in a chatroom. Now, Matrix is cool, and Element is probably the best client for the protocol. Call, but unfortunately, it’s not the most seamless experience to get started with. I think this might cause some issues for beginners.

[5:33] I don’t know what the best method is for addressing this kind of issue, but it’s, Something worth noting in case people who are new to Linux are watching this and are also new to Matrix slash Element, so they can be warned that getting into the room might require some setup because you’ll need to create an account on matrix.org and all of that, which is not a seamless process. It’s not completely horrible, but it’s not a seamless process.

[5:59] I’ll have a guide linked in the description for anyone who needs it. You know, that reminds me, there’s another thing for beginners that could be a problem. The Software Manager app is now hiding unverified Flatpaks from the Flathub by default.

[6:13] Now, for those unfamiliar with any of those terms, Flatpaks are a universal app packaging format which lets developers create a single package for their app that can be used on practically any distro. If you went back in time about 10 years ago, the old way of doing things was not ideal, to say the least. I might make a video on that later if you want let me know in the comments but Flatpaks are very cool and I use them all the time and you get them from a website called flathub.org now the Flathub allows for developers to make their own Flatpaks for users and also well anyone really can make a Flatpak and then submit it to the Flathub this is where the verified and unverified thing comes in verified means that the Flatpak is officially maintained by the developers of the app, or the developers of the app approve the community maintainers that are making the Flatpak. Whereas unverified means that it’s a community-maintained app, but it is not sanctioned at all by the developers.

[7:17] That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good thing or a bad thing, just not a verified thing. With this in mind, the Linux Mint team have disabled those unofficial or unverified Flatpaks from showing in the Software Manager by default. Of course, you can go into the preferences and enable them if you want to, but that requires the user first to know that that’s a thing and also to go do it.

[7:41] Now, to be clear, I think this is a good idea overall in the grand scheme, and I agree that only offering verified apps for install is a safer way to implement the Flathub. The issue for beginners is that these unverified apps don’t show at all in the search results. You have to go into the preferences and then enable them before they show. I think this is not the best way to do it because when a beginner searches for something like Google Chrome, for example, they don’t see the option. There’s no warning that Chrome is unverified. It just isn’t there at all. I think it would be better to show the unverified apps in the results, but when the user goes to install it, the button is grayed out, for example, and then there’s a warning that it’s presented to them and they can choose to enable the unverified apps or not in the preferences. Just kind of let them know about it because right now users aren’t given any notice and they might just think it’s not possible. And some people might even use this as a hit against Linux, like the entire platform, like oh, Linux doesn’t even have Chrome, how could I use this, that kind of thing. Of course, they could just go to the Chrome website to download it, which would bypass the downside.

[8:54] This can also be applied to other apps too. So it’s just kind of a bigger scale in that sense. Like for example, Spotify would have the same similar issue. The Software Manager store itself is really good though. I installed about 14 apps using the store and eight of them were on the front page of the store. So I didn’t even have to search for them. Well, like half of the apps I wanted, more than half of the apps I wanted. That’s very, very cool.

[9:19] Let’s move on to the Welcome Screen. and I love the Welcome Screen that comes with Linux Mint 22. When you first start up the system, it gives you quick access to some pretty important features and settings. There’s also a section about documentation and getting help if you need it, which is great, as well as a quick place to contribute to the project if you want to. Now, the first step section is by far the most useful part of the Welcome Screen, in my opinion, as it helps you take care of a few things very, very quickly. First thing we need to talk about is that you can customize the desktop colors for a light mode or a dark mode, which is really nice and handy for people who get headaches depending on which version is running. And then you can change the accent colors of the system. I turned on dark mode and left the rest default because I like the default folder icons and the blue accent. I’m kind of surprised that it’s not a green accent by default, but I like it. Next is the system snapshots feature, which is just dope, because if something goes wrong with an update, you can quickly restore your computer to the previous working state.

[10:29] Very useful. By default, this feature only applies to system files, but you can choose to include your home folder files if you want to. And for those who are new and you don’t know what a home folder is, Well, basically, that’s your user folder, like the home folder is the Linux terminology for where you store your user files, like your downloads folder and stuff like that. And the root folder is where it stores your system files.

[10:57] Now, I don’t keep files in my home folder most of the time. I have separate drives where I store my data, so I don’t really want my home folder included. But I really love the third option that they have because they’ve given you an option to save hidden files from your home folder as well as the home folder. Now, this is great because these are basically the user configuration files and saving these in a snapshot could be very helpful if something goes wrong because you’d be able to get your configurations back pretty quickly. Now, I would recommend relabeling this as config files instead of hidden files because maybe hidden files might make someone think they shouldn’t do it because they might be thinking it’s hidden for a reason and that reason is really just to avoid clutter in your home folder. So, okay, that might be, there’s more than that, but it’s just a thought. There’s also a driver manager in the Welcome Screen that lets you easily install graphics drivers for people who have NVIDIA hardware, as well as other drivers. I didn’t test this because I don’t have NVIDIA hardware. I have AMD both in my desktop and in my laptop, so I don’t know if this is going to work well or not. I wish I did have some NVIDIA stuff to test this.

[12:11] I could put it in the video to help you out, but I don’t know. I saw reports of some people saying it worked great and other people saying that their NVIDIA GPUs weren’t working properly or even in some cases not found by the system. So again, I don’t know. Next, we have the Update Manager, which is pretty straightforward of being a manager of updates. But I really like the option it gives when you first launch it for finding closer mirrors to you to make the downloads of packages faster. That’s very cool. I just left the default because the differences were not that much for me, so I didn’t really bother to do it, but it might be something useful for you. The system settings app is where you can change basically all of the settings on your system.

[12:56] Makes sense, right? You can change your display stuff, your keyboard settings, all sorts of stuff. I’ll let you check out what you can do there because, you know, there’s too much to list here. Next up is the Firewall. Now, by default, Linux Mint does not come with a Firewall active, but you can use this to quickly enable one. I don’t know why they don’t just do this by default. I’m curious. If anyone watches this knows why, please leave a comment to let me know. I have multiple monitors, but two that I use most of the time. Both of these are 4K 27-inch monitors from BenQ. I got these monitors for their color accuracy, which is critical for my graphics design work and my UX design work.

[13:39] Linux Mint 22 works fine with these monitors, though fractional scaling is turned off by default. fault. Ubuntu 24.04 has auto-detection that they are 4K and turns on fractional scaling automatically, which is awesome. And Mint 22 supports the feature just fine, but it has to be manually enabled. Though I will say it’s very nice to have display settings as an option in the menu when you right-click on the desktop. That’s a very convenient place to put it. I changed the display settings for the monitors during the live install that way, so I could see stuff easier. But unfortunately it didn’t migrate the settings after when after it was installed i was hoping it would do that but that’s not really a deal breaker or anything but it would have been cool if it could do that or i guess the more optimal thing is just automatically detecting 4k and then.

[14:29] Setting up the fractional scaling now there is something cool that i wanted to talk to you about with the fractional scaling because it works independently per monitor because sometimes i I use three monitors and the third one is not even close to 4K. This is really cool because some desktops don’t support fractional scaling at all, while some do support it, but require Wayland for those per monitor settings. If you’re new to Linux, well, Wayland versus X11 is not that important for you to know about because it’s very low level components and it just doesn’t matter for the most part getting started. It, but Linux Mint uses X11 right now and will eventually switch to Wayland. But it’s interesting to me that they have fractional scaling per monitor while being on the older X11, because most desktops don’t do that as far as I’m aware. Though that might relate to an issue I was having. Whenever my system logged out, usually due to inactivity, like leaving my machine on while I went to the store or whatever, and then I reactivate the screens when I get back, and there’s a weird glitch of not showing most of the desktop. It’s kind of like 80% of it moved to the side. I can still interact with it and type in my password to log in, but I can’t see that it is working until I press enter and it logs in. I just assumed it would work and so I tried it, and it did, but you know, still.

[15:50] This could be because of using X11 to do the fractional scaling, but I don’t really know. Though I should note, I didn’t have the issue with my laptop testing just on my desktop. Since we’re on the topic of issues, I had a weird issue related to Chromium-based browsers, like Google Chrome, Brave, Vivaldi, or of course Chromium. Now, Linux Mint comes with Mozilla Firefox by default, and that is my favorite browser, and it has been for many, many years. I even made some videos on Firefox here on this channel if you want to check them out. But there are some super annoying websites that require you to use Chromium-based browsers for some features or whatever. Now this is annoying, but it is what it is. The service we use to record Destination Linux Podcast is one of these sites, so I had to install something to use it. I installed Brave as a flatpak in the Software Manager, and I tried to launch it to record an episode of the podcast, it wouldn’t launch.

[16:48] There were not any errors or anything, it just wouldn’t launch at all. I tried multiple times, and nothing. So I decided I’ll try another browser. I installed Vivaldi as a flatpack, and same thing, just wouldn’t launch. I thought maybe it was because the browsers I was trying were all Flatpaks, so I downloaded the dev version of Google Chrome from their website. I installed that, and nothing. Still nothing. I launched the browsers from the terminal then to see if there were any errors that I could use to fix the problem.

[17:21] But the results I got from searching online didn’t really help at all. Now, not only do we record from a service that requires this kind of browser, but when I ran into this issue, we were set to record in about five minutes. So yeah, I was late. Just a little bit.

[17:42] This was frustrating, obviously, so I shut down the machine and booted into the Fedora system that I was using before my testing with Linux Mint. I successfully recorded DL. You can watch it here. And yes, of course, Ryan gave me a hard time about having to switch back to Fedora and the issue’s not running and not testing a specific thing right before doing the show. But once we were done, I rebooted back into Mint 22 to see if I can figure out what the issue was.

[18:11] But like magic, it was gone. I tested all of the browsers I installed and they all worked. I don’t know what the issue was, but it’s gone now and I have used the browsers many times since and it hasn’t happened again. I suspected some kind of first run bug and I got one comment with the episode of DL that said something really interesting about maybe it’s something to do with the key ring system, which kind of makes sense because the Chromium-based browsers do use the key ring system quite a bit. So it could be that, but I don’t know.

[18:46] Now, once you reboot, somehow that fixes it. But, you know, I even use Mint 22 for recording the following episode of Destination Linux. And on that episode, Ryan did a live test to see if he could duplicate the problem. And the same thing happened to him. Now, the weird thing about that, though, is the error he got was different than mine. You can even see my reaction in the video of him saying the error. And I was like, what?

[19:09] Anyway, all of this is to say, if you have this issue, just try turning it off and on again. Now, there are a few other things I want to mention, but they’re kind of small things. So I just want to do them in like a rapid fire style. First, some stuff I liked about Mint 22. I love how middle click is used for closing stuff basically everywhere. I know some people think it isn’t a good idea because people can accidentally close stuff, but there’s a lot of users that don’t even know that middle click exists. So I doubt it’s dangerous to be default. Oh, by the way, if you don’t know the scroll wheel, like on a mouse, the scroll wheel right here, if you press that down, that’s middle click. So there you go. Another small thing I loved about Mint 22 is that you can double click on the top edge of a window to maximize vertically and on the side edge to maximize horizontally. In addition to the typical double click title bar for full maximize. I found this accidentally when I was trying to just do a full maximize and the cursor happened to be on the top edge, which is, you know, it’s kind of fun. It was a cool experience, but to have that happen, randomly finding functionality like that. So I like that. There were also some features that were turned off by default that I don’t know why they’re turned off.

[20:26] Like for example, touchpad gestures, hot corners, and for some reason the animation to the main menu was turned off. I turned all of that on and they all worked fine so I’m not sure why they were off out of the box but I mean if you know, comment below.

[20:42] One thing I didn’t like was the keyboard shortcut for the Windows Expose was Ctrl-Alt-Down and Ctrl-Alt-Up for Workspace Expose. This requires two hands to activate or do finger gymnastics So I changed the Windows Exposé to Super W and the Workspaces Exposé to Super Alt W. And this is by no means a deal breaker because you can just change it, but I’m including it here because maybe it could be considered something to change for a future release because in my opinion, the ones I suggested are a lot more convenient. Now here’s something I wish it had, but it doesn’t. A Do Not Disturb mode for temporarily turning off notifications.

[21:26] Now, it’d be even better if you could automatically turn them back on after a set time, but just at all is very good. This bit me when I was recording the podcast, and notification sounds started going off in quick succession. I also couldn’t find a way to only turn off sounds for notifications,

[21:42] so I had to turn off the notifications entirely, and I forgot to turn them back on until the next day. So that’s why I would prefer to have Do Not Disturb, and it’s on my wish list for a future release. Overall, I think this release is really, really good. It’s another entry into the box for Linux Mint being a great first option for beginners. They offer a lot of great features using the very smooth Cinnamon desktop with a solid base underneath. So in Linux Mint 22, it’s worth checking out if you’re wondering, yes, yes it is. I’d say without a doubt that Linux Mint 22 is easily the best release of Linux Mint that I’ve ever used. Though it could use a bit of settings tweaking, to be a bit better for me and maybe for you. Now, Linux Mint 21.3 is supported for security updates until 2027. So is it worth upgrading for version 22 with all the features and stuff? In my opinion, yes, absolutely. Getting PipeWire by default, the hardware enablement for Ubuntu.

[22:44] Online accounts integration, better looking web apps, better functioning web

[22:48] apps, and more and more makes it really easy to recommend upgrading to Linux Mint 22. Linux Mint uses the Cinnamon Desktop. In fact, they make the Cinnamon Desktop. And it is a great desktop with a lot of cool features. So I think most people will have a great experience with Linux Mint. But it’s not the most powerful desktop available on Linux. That crown easily goes to KDE Plasma. And if you want to see some really cool hidden power user features that are available in Plasma, well, check out this video.