Linux Mint 22.1 Xia Cinnamon Review - A Reasonable, Rounded Desktop Experience

Over the years, the Linux desktop has become easier to use and more accessible. One "victim" of this progress is Linux Mint, in a way. Created as the ultimate pimped-up version of Ubuntu with everything available and working out of the box, for a long time, Mint offered Windows converts the most convenient Linux desktop experience there was. You wanted it, Mint had it. Then, Linux improved across the board, and Mint lost some of its advantage. It's been quite a while since I tested any version of Mint. Overall, it's still a nice distro, and the flagship Cinnamon desktop does its work reasonably well. But it's not as shiny and awesome as it used to be.

Linux Mint 22.1 Xia comes with its signature look - a somewhat darker-colored desktop with a Mint logo. Immediately recognizable, but a bit too somber. And on my test box, the IdeaPad 3, which I used for my long series of Wayland vs X11 benchmarks recently, the default 1920x1080px 14-inch display setup feels a bit too small for comfort, so I decided to scale up the interface. Alas, at first glance, you only seem to get the 100% and 200% factors. This does feel very old-school Gnome.

Now, if you click on Settings, you can enable (experimental) fractional scaling, which gives you 25% increments. This helped, but not that much. Namely, the UI doesn't have enough contrast for my taste, similar to most "modern" interfaces. I also increased the font size from default 10 to 11, and then later on to 12. This helped some more, but there was still a bit of blurriness in the overall look & feel, similar to what I reported the last time.

One strong side of Cinnamon is that you can customize it a lot. Sure, some of the settings are a bit hidden, or a bit hard to find, and some of the workflow is a bit cumbersome, but you can get things nicer and more polished, including different icons or window borders. We will talk about this some more later on.

Last on the customization side of things, the wallpaper loading is slow. You wait almost a second between each image being shown. Could be the live session thing, but still. The installation was classic Ubuntu, before the Material Design redesign or whatever. Better than the modern thing, in some ways, at least ergonomically.

The installer was frozen while scanning for partitions. A good few minutes. Let's start with some good news. A perfectly clean boot sequence. Few distros manage to do this utterly, utterly simple thing. Linux Mint 22.1 does. No nonsense text messages or errors or virtual console buffers. A simple boot, followed by the login screen. Clean and lovely.

The desktop preserved my Wi-Fi but nothing else. MX Linux is the only distro that does the session save so elegantly well. Mint does give you a solid Welcome screen, which lets you customize various aspect of your system. Could be a bit more streamlined, but it does the job.

Linux Mint 22.1 comes with a solid array of wallpapers, including some nice bright scenery. I also tried Yaru and Papirus icons, and I think the latter offer the best results. Mint's default icons feel a bit too identical to one another, save for the folder icon, which is distinctly different, and makes my OCD pixies grumble.

I couldn't change the font color through the UI. You can hack CSS themes, but that's not a friendly way of doing things, not in 2025. As it stands, in my view, the fonts could do with more contrast, but at least you get the superior Ubuntu fonts.

Speaking of font blurring, if you recall, switching from slight to full hinting helped a lot. So there's that, especially if you use display scaling. As I mentioned in the live session section, you can change your themes. Now, there are way too many options. Mint-X, Mint-L, Mint-Y. You can't really be sure which one is it you want or need.

I found the Mint-Y theme to offer better contrast and deeper colors than Mint-L. Then, there are multiple color versions, but these only apply to Mint icons. So if you choose say Papirus icons, the desktop layout choice is rather irrelevant, as they all look almost identical.

The file manager is a-okay. Not as customizable as Dolphin, but it does the job, and has all the important, functional bits and pieces. On the other hand, the terminal application has no menu shown by default, so you don't really have a way to spawn new windows or tabs without right-clicking.

Mint 22.1 offers the usual deal - Software Manager to grab your packages, Updates to update them. The former doesn't look that spectacular, but works fine. The latter actually has more than just the update functionality. It also lets you toggle Flatpak packages on/off (which are preselected and offered by default), something that would be better served through Software Manager, methinks.

Unlike what I've shown you in my openSUSE Tumbleweed review, Zorin OS review or Fedora 42 (see the last part of the benchmark article linked earlier), Mint 22.1 does not show unverified Flatpak packages out of the box, and it highlights these as a potential security risk. Rightly so.

Insert Michael Scott thank you meme here, if you please. Unverified toggle in Software, Flatpak updates in Updates. A bit confusing.

Back to the Software Manager, it does need some polish. For example, VLC. It's listed as system package, which sounds confusing. Perhaps the idea here is that it's a Deb, so it comes from the archives? Also, notice the screenshot showing a video playback (of someone playing music) with the interface audio muted. Eh.

More screenshots, more examples would help create a better user experience. Indeed, if you search for something that comes as Flatpak, and you allow these, you will then see a different option. It will say Flatpak (flathub). If you don't know what this is about, then you may be confused what flathub stands for.

Overall, the system is speedy enough, but not blazing fast. However, if you turn off desktop effects, everything flies. This makes a similar result to running Plasma with compositing off, in many ways.

The boot sequence was a bit slow, about 15 seconds to login screen and 5 seconds to a fully ready desktop, in line with other systemd-powered distros I tried on this box, but behind the init-powered MX Linux. Samba performance was quite disappointing, with long latency browsing or showing the shares.

The copy throughput was also average, lower than what I've shown you in my more recent Plasma tests. Now, battery wise, with brightness on 90% and balanced power mode, the system reported 3 hours of light use, with the desktop effects turned off, mind.

Add to that the brightness factor, battery degradation, and we're talking 4-4.5 hours of real life usage. So, if you ask me, it's a jolly good alternative to stock Gnome, but generally, I find Plasma-clad desktops to offer an ever so slightly more elegant experience.