Clem Lefebvre, head of the Linux Mint project, has announced that Linux Mint 21.2 will carry the codename “Victoria” and that it will be released at the end of June in three flavours; Cinnamon, MATE, and Xfce. As part of the announcement, some of the upcoming changes were previewed.
The main things from Linux Mint 21.2 that were talked about were login screen improvements, a rebase of the Pix image management program, and support for HEIF and AVIF image files as well as Adobe Illustrator document support in the Xreader document viewer.
In Linux Mint 21.2, users will be able to switch between keyboard layouts on the login screen. The indicator in the top-right corner, when clicked, will present a menu showing your default system layouts that you’ve chosen before, under those will be a more layouts option where you can access other supported layouts.
If you like using tap-to-click on your touchpad, this is now enabled on the login screen too. The login screen’s optional on-screen keyboard, Onboard, is also now more configurable and the keyboard navigation on the login screen was improved allowing the arrow keys to be used to edit passwords.
The Pix image manager is based on gThumb and with Linux Mint 21.2, it’s being rebased on gThumb 3.12.2 from 3.2.8. This means it will have a new interface that uses headerbars and buttons rather than toolbars and menu bars. Lefebvre said that this UI is “less discoverable for newcomers” but is cleaner and still intuitive. This update brings 168 new features and user-visible changes including better performance, support for AVIF/HEIF, and JXL formats, configurable dark mode, and more.
Finally, Linux Mint will have support for HEIF and AVIF image files and Adobe Illustrator documents will be properly supported in Linux Mint’s home-grown document viewer, Xreader.
If Linux Mint 21.2 stays on schedule, users should expect a beta release in mid-June to allow for two weeks of testing before the final release.