Linux Mint has released its regular monthly newsletter; this time, we have some exciting updates to share with you. First up, the team is making steady progress toward the beta release of Linux Mint 22.2 “Zara,” with a slew of new features and refinements in the pipeline.
Currently in the final stages of development, Mint 22.2 is shaping up to be a noteworthy update. The team is focusing on merging pull requests and polishing packages, though an exact release date hasn’t been set just yet. If all goes according to plan, users can expect the beta to drop by late July or early August.
Some of the key improvements in this release include:
- Hardware Enablement (HWE) kernel: Mint 22.2 will ship with an up-to-date HWE stack, ensuring broader support for bleeding-edge CPUs, GPUs, and wireless chipsets right out of the gate.
- Fingerprint authentication via Fingwit: The headline feature is a slick new XApp that handles fingerprint enrollment and login. It’s built atop fprintd but adds smarter PAM logic, allowing a graceful fallback to passwords when encrypted home directories or other edge cases get in the way.
- Theme and UI polish: The Mint-Y palette gets a subtle splash of blue “to make grey look a tad more metallic and modern,” while support for accent colors in libAdwaita/Flatpak apps means third-party software finally respects the user’s chosen theme.
- Cinnamon-on-Wayland improvements: Work continues on bringing full input-method and keyboard-layout support to the experimental Wayland session, closing one of the last big gaps for users of non-Latin or complex scripts.
Once Linux Mint 22.2 stabilizes, attention will shift to the upcoming LMDE 7, which now has an official codename—”Gigi.” It is expected to enter the spotlight around September.
Building on the same improvements as its Ubuntu-based counterpart, Gigi will instead run on a Debian 13 package base, for users who prefer Debian’s rolling security updates, stability, and reliability, but still want Mint’s trademark usability polish.
One standout feature in LMDE 7 will be the introduction of OEM installation support—a first for the Debian edition, addressing a notable limitation in LMDE 6. Of course, all improvements made this summer—particularly around input methods—will also roll straight into Gigi.
For more information, see the announcement on Mint’s blog.
