Which Linux Mint October Features Can Existing Users Get Now?

Xenity is the part of Linux Mint's October report that existing Mint 22.x and LMDE 7 users can obtain now. Hibernation controls, a Nemo preview pane and several new desktop tools appear in the same post, but they are development previews. An update to one package will not deliver the whole collection.

Clem's October 31 monthly report makes that distinction at the outset: the features being presented are still under development for the next version. Later, the Xenity section explicitly names repositories for two current release families. Read those availability statements separately before looking for a missing menu or changing a working script.

Xenity has a job behind the scenes

Xenity is a fork of Zenity 3.44, the GTK3 program used to display graphical dialogs from scripts. Mint says the fork keeps the same syntax, features and appearance. Cinnamon spices are being moved over to it.

A dialog might be the only visible part of a longer script. The command behind a desktop extension can depend on particular arguments or returned values, even when all the user sees is a question and two buttons. Preserving the syntax gives those scripts a less disruptive route to the new utility. That is the practical reason to care about this fork.

Mint's repository statement names 22.x and LMDE 7. It does not promise availability for every older release. Check the release installed on the machine before treating a package announcement as an instruction to replace something.

The sleep menu is future work

The planned Sleep Modes page will live in the System Administration tool. Its purpose is to make hibernation easier to enable and configure. Mint also describes hybrid sleep and suspend-then-hibernate.

These choices preserve a session differently. Suspend keeps it in memory and continues using power. Hibernation writes it to disk, requiring sufficient swap space. Hybrid sleep adds a disk copy to a suspended session. Suspend-then-hibernate begins with suspend and moves to hibernation when the battery becomes critical.

A development screenshot is not a reason to repartition an existing laptop. Wait for the instructions accompanying the released feature, then test recovery with saved work before relying on it.

Nemo and the new utilities

Nemo's proposed preview pane would show metadata and previews for pictures, audio and video, with F7 as a toggle. Superlight, Velocitty and Unfold are also new tools described in the report. F7 is worth remembering if you want the preview pane; it is not evidence that the pane has reached your current installation.

If a desktop helper stops working after an update, record the error and when it happened. Our journalctl troubleshooting guide explains how to inspect the service and surrounding boot records while preserving the evidence. First establish what actually changed on that computer. Keep the package name, release and first error together in a bug report; a screenshot of a future menu will not identify a present failure.