The team behind the user-friendly Linux Mint distribution has released version 18.2, dubbed Sonya. Various flavours of the release were released simultaneously; you can find Cinnamon, MATE, KDE, and Xfce editions all available for download on the Linux Mint website. It doesn’t look like the upgrade paths from older releases have been made available just yet, with the team probably want to work out a few post-release kinks before opening the flood gates.

Discussing the upgrade path, Clem Lefebvre, the head of Linux Mint, said:

“Upgrade paths will be opened to let Mint 18 and Mint 18.1 users easily upgrade towards 18.2 from their Update Manager. Announcements will be made when this is ready.”

The new release brings updates to several of the desktop environments. Cinnamon has been upgraded to version 3.4, MATE has been bumped to version 1.18, and Xfce has been upgraded to version 1.7.2. Meanwhile, the KDE version will continue to ship with Plasma 5.8. The stylish LightDM has been adopted as the login manager and has support for guest sessions.

The core Linux Mint apps including Blueberry, Xed, Xplayer, Xreader, Pix, Xviewer, the Update Manager, and the Software sources configuration tool have undergone further improvements. The developers added a CLI interface for the update tool so that advanced users can now automate updates by writing scripts, routines, or cron jobs. Furthermore, the CLI interface has many of the features that the GUI includes such as level selection, security updates, kernel updates, and blacklisting.

For those looking to jump to the new release, you can either download the ISO images now or wait until the upgrade path has been made available in the next week or so. Anyone on Linux Mint 18 or 18.1 will be offered the upgrade. The entire 18.x series will be supported until 2021 so it is not mandatory to jump to 18.2 and you should only do so if you really want to use the new features or if something isn’t working correctly on your installation.

Source: Linux Mint