Linux Mint 21 gets serious with its development, and Cinnamon 5.4 is also in the works

I think never an article as short as last of Clem Lefebvre said as much. The April entry on his blog does not contain much text, but he did give at least two important pieces of information. The first is that they have started with the basis of Linux Mint 21. We already knew that they had taken the first steps and that her code name will be Vanessa, but now we can say that the engines of her development are running at full capacity.

The other important fact that they have given is that the rebased from Mutter for Cinnamon 5.4 is ok and it is becoming more and more stable. In the little written text they have also managed to put in that it has taken time to develop the new update tool, but that the wait has been worth it. What they had to fix was that the major updates weren't flexible enough and were too complicated.

Linux Mint 21 will be called "Vanessa"

The Mutter base for Cinnamon 5.4 is now well on its way and becoming more stable. Work has started on the Linux Mint 21 base. The repositories are ready and so are the docker images. A first pre-ALPHA ISO was built to identify potential issues and we are now patching the software and finding and fixing regressions. Typically, we work on new features first, and then on the base and bugs near the end of the development cycle, when we put it all together in the new base. But this time, we have done the opposite. He wanted us to deal with some of the new libraries and upstream changes so that we could have a clear view of the challenges ahead and plan accordingly when prioritizing or deferring work on some of the new features.

Regarding the launch, Clem has limited himself to saying that will arrive sometime in the summer, and that the update will be smooth.