Earlier this month, Clement Lefebvre advanced that the next version of the system that he and his team develop would arrive at Christmas. There is still a week left before, at least in countries like Spain, these celebrations officially begin, and for a few hours we can already try Linux Mint 20.1, but not in a stable version, but in its first beta. Like most distributions, Lefebvre makes these images available for us to test and report possible bugs.
Personally, a week seems like a very short time to test an operating system, since these days you have to find some bugs and correct them, but that's how the Linux Mint team works beta 1 usually arrive within these deadlines. In any case, Peppermint is an unofficial Ubuntu flavor, and in case of problems, these should be more on desktops / graphical environments than on base.
Linux Mint 20.1 will follow on Linux 5.4
At the end of November, the Linux Mint team also released a new version of the graphical environment they develop, a Cinnamon 4.8 that comes with interesting changes. The version included is 4.8.3 And, it must be said, it is the purest Linux Mint, since it is where its developers focus the most. It is also available in MATE and Xfce, but these are desktops that do not depend on them.
Linux Mint 20.1, which will come under the codename Ulyssa, will continue with Linux 5.4, the kernel that uses the Focal Fossa on which it is based. But the version that will arrive in a few days is not based on the version of Ubuntu released in April, but on its first revision, or what is the same, on Ubuntu 20.04.1. As for alternate graphics environments, Ulyssa will arrive in MATE 1.24 and Xfce 4.14.
Linux Mint 20.1 Beta 1 can now be downloaded from the project server, which we can access from this link.
And you can not update from 20 to beta this? I say it because mint betas, they call them betas, but they are totally stable in reality, you can install them without any fear, also later the same beta, without you having to doing nothing becomes stable, I know because I've had mint betas installed, but from scratch, I think there are people who had done updating but I don't know how it will be.
I've been testing the Linux Mint beta for years and I assure you that from these versions to the final, there are few differences. These betas have always been characterized by their great stability.