Linux Mint 20.1 is a long term support release which will be supported until 2025. It comes with updated software and brings refinements and many new features to make your desktop experience more comfortable.
Linux Mint 20.1 "Ulyssa" Cinnamon Edition
Web Apps
In Linux Mint 20.1 you can turn any website into a desktop application.
Launch the new Web App manager and create your Web App:
The new Web-App manager
Web Apps are easy to create and you can make as many as you want:
Turn any website into a Web-App
When a Web App runs it behaves like a desktop application. It has its own window and its own icon:
Web-Apps run in their own window
It shows up as any other application in the panel and in the Alt-Tab selector:
Alt-Tab between Apps and Web-Apps alike
You can pin it to your panel if you want to be able to access it quickly even when it's not running:
Pin Web-Apps to the panel for easy access
And it has an entry in your application menu, just like any other apps:
Web-Apps can have a dedicated Web category in the application menu
It's easier to multi-task between applications on the desktop than it is between tabs in a web browser. As more and more useful tools are available on the Web, it was important for Linux Mint to make it easier to create web-apps.
In addition to Electron wrappers, Web-apps also provide a solution for tools which do not support Linux very well. WhatsApp, Github among others provide rich Web interfaces but no desktop support in Linux.
Hypnotix
Another application which is new in Linux Mint 20.1 is Hypnotix, an IPTV player for M3U playlists.
Hypnotix, the new IPTV player.
It supports live TV:
Watch TV
And if your playlist or IPTV provider also has a VOD section, Hypnotix can support movies:
Play movies
or even TV series:
Watch TV series
By default Hypnotix comes with a free IPTV provider called Free-IPTV. This provider only provides freely and publicly available live TV channels. Linux Mint itself is not an IPTV provider and does not provide any live channels, movies or TV series.
Favorites
Time and time again we need to access the same files. Up until Linux Mint 20.1 we would remember where they were stored and slowly get to them using the file manager, bookmark their containing folder to get to them faster, look in the recently opened document section, hoping to find them in there, clutter our desktop with direct links...
Well, there's a much better way now!
If you're working on a file and you know you access it often, right-click it and select "Add to Favorites".
Add a file to Favorites
You'll see a little star pop up in your panel. That's where all favorite files are, just one click away:
Favorites are one click away...
You'll also find them in your application menu:
...or two
Your file manager now also has a dedicated section, where you can access but also manage your favorites:
Favorites section in the file manager
And that's it! Your favorite files are now really easy to find!
Support for favorites also extends to Xed, Xreader, Xviewer, Pix and Warpinator. These applications include menus, sidebar items or widgets dedicated to favorites.
File chooser dialogs in all GTK3 applications also have a favorites section.
Favorites is part of libXapp so it can be supported very easily by any GTK application or desktop environment.
Favorites do not rely on file indexation so this doesn't affect the performance of your computer.
Files from removable or remote medias are supported as well.
Cinnamon 4.8
The latest version of Cinnamon features better performance, including a 5% rendering improvement at 4K and lower use in its window management and a faster Javascript interpreter based on MozJS78.
Support for spices is also improved thanks to automatic forward compatibility with newer releases of Cinnamon, automatic multi-versioning and better network handling.
Search results in the application menu are now sorted by relevance.
Support was added for Systemd's "suspend-then-hibernate" mechanism.
Other improvements include:
- Better Flatpak support
- Percentage in the sound volume OSD
- The option to always show the panel when the menu is open
- Scrolling in the window-quick-list applet
- Configurable scrolling direction in the workspace-switcher-applet
- The ability to assign a keybinding to mute the microphone
- Zstd support in nemo-fileroller
- Tiff support and PDF page numbers in nemo-media-columns
- Thumbnails for files up to 64GB in nemo
Printing and Scanning improvements
In Linux Mint 19.3 (and Ubuntu 18.04) and prior releases printers and scanners relied on the availability of drivers (whether these were included in the Linux kernel or added manually).
In Linux Mint 20 (and Ubuntu 20.04), the distribution shipped with ippusbxd, an implementation of IPP over USB. Thanks to IPP, also referred to as driverless printing/scanning, devices can be detected and used without the need for any drivers and in a standard way. Unfortunately the presence of IPP over USB also means drivers are bypassed and inhibited. Ippusbxd turned out to be a disappointment and created more problems than it solved.
In Linux Mint 20.1 ippusbxd was removed so printing and scanning work the same way as in Linux Mint 19.x and prior releases.
HPLIP was upgraded to version 3.20.11 to bring the latest support for HP printers and scanner.
Documentation sections were added to the Linux Mint User Guide for IPP-USB and Sane-Airscan, two very new yet promising projects which might be included by default in future releases.
Both ipp-usb and sane-airscan are available in the Linux Mint 20.1 repositories. Try them out if you can't get your printer or scanner to work with software drivers.
XApps improvements
The clock format in Slick Greeter (the login screen) is now configurable.
Xed can now automatically close brackets when it's used to edit source code.
In Xviewer, the behaviors of the primary and secondary (tilt) mouse wheels are now configurable.
Pix is now able to filter by rating.
Other improvements
Hardware video acceleration is now enabled by default in Celluloid. On most computers this results in smoother playback, better performance and reduced CPU usage.
The driver manager was migrated to PackageKit. It features a stronger resolution of package dependencies and its user interface was improved.
Some projects such as mintsystem and mintdrivers are now backported to earlier releases and contain their own translations.
Chromium was added to the repository.
More projects were ported to the Meson build system: cinnamon-control-center, cinnamon-settings-daemon, nemo-extensions.
The upload manager, mintupload, features better a looking user interface and a better drop zone.
System improvements
Linux Mint 20.1 features a unified filesystem layout.
This release ships with linux-firmware 1.187 and the Linux kernel 5.4.
Artwork improvements
Linux Mint 20.1 features a superb collection of backgrounds from Bruno Fantinatti, Evgeni Tcherkasski, Fabien Bellanger, Jan Kaluza, Jase Bloor, Joanna Kosinska, James Donovan, Jung Ho Park, Llyoyd Blunk, Lucas Marconnet, Lerone Pieters, Paul Carmona, Ryan Booth, Rohit Ranwa, Simon Berger, Samuel Ferrara, Mohammad Shahhosseini, Sandro Schuh, Smit Shah, Szabolcs Toth, Scott Umstattd and Tangerine Chan
An overview of the new backgrounds
Main components
Linux Mint 20.1 features Cinnamon 4.8, a Linux kernel 5.4 and an Ubuntu 20.04 package base.
LTS strategy
Linux Mint 20.1 will receive security updates until 2025.
Until 2022, future versions of Linux Mint will use the same package base as Linux Mint 20.1, making it trivial for people to upgrade.
Until 2022, the development team won't start working on a new base and will be fully focused on this one.
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