Linux Mint 22 Will Use The PipeWire Sound Server, Support JPEG-XL Images

In their March status update, the Linux Mint team shares more details on their forthcoming Linux Mint 22 release that will be based off Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.

Among the recent updates in the road to Linux Mint 22 include more work on localization support, the Software Sources tool will support the Deb822 format, PipeWire will serve as the default sound server of Linux Mint 22, the Pix image viewer will support JPEG-XL images, and they intend to follow the Ubuntu kernel versions used moving forward. Linux Mint has also worked on a new thumbnailer for GIMP files, Linux Mint will package their own Thunderbird mail client rather than following Ubuntu's use of a Thunderbird Snap, and GNOME Online Accounts has been forked into a new Linux Mint XApp. Linux Mint also continues developing the Jargonaut chat room app.

It's nice seeing JPEG-XL support on Linux Mint considering Ubuntu 24.04 won't support JPEG-XL out-of-the-box but require installing a package from the universe archive for support. Meanwhile using PipeWire rather than PulseAudio as the default audio server hardly comes as a surprise these days given nearly all desktop Linux distributions have migrated to using PipeWire for audio/video streams on the Linux desktop.

For more details on the latest Linux Mint development activities, see today's Linux Mint blog post.