After a few days of testing, the Linux Mint team has published today the ISO images of the beta version of the upcoming Linux Mint 22.2 release, which can be downloaded (for testing purposes) from the official mirrors.
Codenamed “Zara”, Linux Mint 22.2 introduces an HWE (Hardware Enablement) kernel, just like the upstream Ubuntu release, which should boost hardware support, fingerprint authentication for all supported editions via a new Fingwit app, accent color support, improved libAdwaita compatibility, and theme updates.
Linux Mint 22.2 also promises improvements to input methods and keyboard layouts for the Cinnamon edition to work with the Wayland session introduced in Linux Mint 21.3. Linux Mint 22.2 ships with the usual editions featuring the Cinnamon 6.4.10, Xfce 4.18, and MATE 1.26 desktop environments.
Under the hood, Linux Mint 22.2 beta is based on Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS (Noble Numbat), and it’s powered by the Linux 6.14 kernel series, which should offer enhanced support for newer hardware compared to the Linux Mint 22.1 “Xia” release, which shipped with Linux kernel 6.8.
Without further ado, you can download the beta version of Linux Mint 22.2 “Zara” right now from the official mirrors linked below, but keep in mind that this is a pre-release version that shouldn’t be used for production work.
An official announcement will be made by the Linux Mint team at the beginning of next week on their blog, now that the beta ISO images have been approved for release. Just like with the previous releases, Linux Mint 22.2 is a long-term support version that will receive security updates until 2029.
