The team behind Linux Mint has made several interesting announcements about the popular Linux distribution and what’s going on behind the scenes. Aside from previewing a fresh coat of paint, they’re also warning you to update Firefox.

A Cinnamon Redesign

The most eye-catching announcement is that the application menu in the Cinnamon edition of Linux Mint is being redesigned. The menu will now show on the left side some pinned folders in addition to your favorite apps, and with titles next to them instead of just icons. Your username and profile picture will appear above those folders and apps. Your entire app library, divided into app categories, will appear on the right side of that. The session buttons (for logging out and rebooting) have been moved from a vertical stack on the left to a horiziontal group on the bottom-right of the menu.

You can compare below the new version on the left and the default look of the old version as of Linux Mint 22 on the right.

The full list of applications grouped by type was already the default for Cinnamon. That menu has been shrunk to accommodate the list of pinned folders and apps and their titles. The corners of the menu are also significantly rounder, which would better match the rounded corners on application windows in Cinnamon.

Cinnamon is just one desktop environment you can choose from when you download a Linux Mint image to install. The other options are Xfce and MATE, and I haven’t heard if those other editions are getting similar refreshes.

Download Stats Released

Speaking of alternative editions of Mint, the development team also shared on their blog a breakdown of which desktop editions and which releases are getting downloaded from their website. Mint doesn’t collect telemetry from the operating system itself, so but it does track how often the various ISO files are downloaded. For desktop editions, out of over 98,000 downloads, the breakdown was as follows:

• Cinnamon: 44.8%
• Xfce: 22.28%
• MATE: 16.95%
• LMDE 6: 9.4%
• EDGE: 5.8%

I was personally surprised at how popular LMDE editions are at 9.4 percent. Knowing the Debian edition is intended as a fallback distro in case Ubuntu ever became unreliable as a base, I assumed virtually no one felt the need to use it. Evidently I was wrong, and even if I’m not, there’s something to be said for archiving these distros too.

Since these are just download counts, we don’t know how much these ISOs are actually getting used or in what way. Still, it’s interesting to know which version of the distro seems to get the most attention. You can see the complete breakdown with some nice charts in the blog post linked below.

Firefox in Peril

The Linux Mint team also issued a warning in their blog post about the version of Mozilla Firefox packaged in their repositories. A root certificate—basically what tells other pieces of software that this piece of software is trustworthy and not malware—is going to expire for Firefox 128 and earlier on March 15. When that happens, Firefox will stop working correctly.

The Mint blog names specifically a few expected problems, including broken add-ons and lost access to DRM-protected content. That would include content like music streamed over Spotify, for example, if you happen to use the Spotify web player. To avoid those problems, you need to use the Update Manager to update Firefox to the latest available release.

Linux Mint has long been a big name in the world of Linux distributions (distros), perhaps best-known as a go-to distro for people who are comfortable with Windows motifs. In other words, if you’ve spent your life using Windows, you should feel relatively at home using Linux Mint. Still, we have writers here at How-To Geek who are familiar with Windows and use Linux but don’t want a distro like Mint.

The changes announced with this blog post are still forthcoming, presumably in the next release, Mint 22.2, but we don’t know that for sure. If you want to try Linux Mint yourself, you can get an ISO from the Linux Mint download page. Then, take that ISO and follow our guide to installing Linux to complete the process.

Source: OMG! Ubuntu, Linux Mint Blog