A beta version of Linux Mint 21 Vanessa is now available for testing in Cinnamon, Mate, and Xfce flavors.

Linux Mint 21 Vanessa Beta released

Last month we got negative feedback about systemd-oom.  After investigating some of the issues we decided not to add it to Linux Mint 21.

Home directory encryption continues to be available in the installer.

The decision was made to keep os-prober enabled by default to guarantee proper dual-boot detection out of the box.

Webp support was added to xviewer and thumbnailers.

Blueman 2.3 is in and replaces Blueberry.

In rsync mode, Timeshift now calculates the required space for the next snapshot and skips it if performing that snapshot lead to less than 1GB free space on the disk.

Check your Automated Updates

On June 21st at 3pm, mintupdate 5.8.3 was released. It only contained two changes, the removal of files we no longer needed and a bump of its package’s debhelper version from 9 to 10.

A few hours later we received a bug report from a user who had taken this update. His automated updates which were disabled until then had been enabled by the update on his behalf. We investigated the situation and found out there was a nasty side effect to updating to debhelper 10; It enabled all the systemd services and timers provided by the package!

We quickly reverted the debhelper version back to 9 and released mintupdate 5.8.4 that same day at 9pm.

Mintupdate 5.8.3 was only available for about 6 hours but users who took it as an update got their automated updates enabled by default.

To know if you were impacted go to “Update Manager -> View ->  History of Updates” and see if mintupdate 5.8.3 is present in the list. If it’s there, you are impacted and your automated updates are enabled. If it’s not (say you’re still on an old version, or you went directly from 5.8.2 to 5.8.4), then you’re not impacted.

If you are impacted go to “Update Manager -> Edit -> Preferences -> Automation” and disable “Automatic Updates”.

In Mint 21, mintupdate 5.8.5 no longer relies solely on systemd timers/services to be enabled. The fact that such a small and innocent change lead to a huge regression really surprised us. This is a lesson for us and it confirms that we should rely on frameworks such as systemd or debhelper as little as possible.

Download Linux Mint 21.0 Vanessa Beta Cinnamon Edition
Download Linux Mint 21.0 Vanessa Beta Mate Edition
Download Linux Mint 21.0 Vanessa Beta Xfce Edition