As Canonical tries to ban the use of flatpaks, Linux Mint 21.2 promises to improve their support starting this summer.

It's true. In part you can accuse me of having done a little clickbait, but very little. Because Canonical doesn't try to veto the use of flatpaks in their official flavors, but yes its default installation, which is to put certain obstacles. And if I could without receiving criticism, I would surely ban them. But for a long time the Linux community has heard something like "the best Ubuntu you can use is Linux Mint" and if you are one of those who thinks something like that, with Linux Mint 21.2 you will keep thinking about it

Clem lefebvre just published the second monthly newsletter of 2023, which corresponds to February, on the project he leads. And it is not that he has announced to great fanfare that will improve support for flatpak packages, as well as if he wanted to make firewood from the fallen tree, but it is something that he has mentioned after thanking the donations received and starting to talk about Linux Mint 21.2.

Linux Mint 21.2 is coming this summer

Clem says that they have already started working on Linux Mint 21.2, and he has told us about the first changes that they have implemented in the version that should arrive this summer. For example, Nemo 5.8 will include multi-threaded thumbnails. Instead of generating thumbnails one by one, Nemo will generate multiple thumbnails in parallel, which is more CPU intensive, but will load the results faster, especially in folders with a large amount of media files.

On the other hand, CJS 5.8 (JavaScript interpreter) will be based on GJS 1.7.4 and will use SpiderMonkey 102. More importantly, the XDG Portal implementation is being written for Cinnamon, MATE and Xfce, and this will provide greater compatibility between graphical environments and non-native apps like flatpaks or libadwaita-based apps. Among other things, this will also allow these apps to take screenshots or support dark mode.

In the rest of this monthly newsletter much has been said about warpinator, partly how it can be used, but more importantly, security bugs have been fixed. No longer related to the operating system but to the project, they have updated their servers.

Linux Mint 21.2 has no codename or confirmed release date yet, but expected to arrive this summer.