Welcome to mintCast

the Podcast by the Linux Mint Community for All Users of Linux

This is Episode 485!

Recorded on Sunday, May 10, 2026.

Started working on headphones again im Joe; … Moss; … Bill; … Majid; … Eric; …Charles; Nobody tells me what folders to put in my home directory, I’m Jim; …Charlie

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First up in the news: Mint Monthly News – April,
In security and privacy: Proton Mail now supports post-quantum encryption,
Then in our Wanderings:

In our Innards section:
In Bodhi Corner,
And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions
Please remember if you want to follow along with our discussions, the full show notes for this episode are linked in the show’s description at https://mintcast.org/show-notes/episode-485-show-notes/.

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The News

20 minutes

Mint Monthly News – April 2026
- by Clem from Linux Mint blog (via londoner)
- HWE ISOs
- On April 16^th, the team announced a longer development cycle and the decision not to release until Christmas 2026. To address compatibility issues with brand new hardware, they decided to start publishing updated ISO images called HWE (Hardware Enablement).
  Linux Mint 22.3 was released in January with kernel 6.14. On April 30^th the team published HWE ISO images for Linux Mint 22.3 with kernel 6.17. Going forward, they will publish HWE ISOs for the latest release whenever a newer kernel becomes available in the package base. Note that these ISOs are not new releases, but they are fully QA-tested and considered stable.
  For more information or to download these ISOs: https://www.linuxmint.com/hwe.php
- ALPHA Phase
  The team is considering adding an ALPHA phase to the new release cycle. This would make it easier for people to get a preview of what is coming, and allow for gathering early feedback on some of the big changes we’re working on.
  There is a new package base, a new screensaver, additional keyboard layout improvements, and a functional Wayland session. There’s a lot to test and more on the way.
- Screensaver Bug Fix
  Sometimes when you lock and suspend (this typically happens when you close the lid on a laptop), upon resume, you get to briefly see the session, until the lock screen appears. An update to cinnamon-settings-daemon (version 6.6.4) was pushed towards Linux Mint 22.3 and LMDE 7 to address this issue.
NHS to close-source hundreds of GitHub repos over AI, security concerns (Charlie)
After Days of DDoS, Now Ubuntu’s Twitter Account Seems to be Compromised (Charlie)
Linux Kernel 7.0 is Out With Improvements Across the Board for Intel, AMD, and Storage (Jim)
Linux is Getting a New Default Folder in Your Home Directory (Jim)
Chrome Silently Installs a 4GB A.I. Model On Your Device Without Consent (Jim)
Oh No! Now A Federal Bill Wants OS-Level Age Verification for Everyone in the USA (Jim)
Kids Bypass Age Verification With Fake Moustaches (Jim)
The Audio Industry Is Grappling With the Rise of ‘Podslop’ (Jim)
Will Euro-Office be using ODF? (Joe)
- Euro-Office – the new coalition forming around a European alternative for productivity was asked if they were planning on using ODF as the standard but did not respond
- ODF(open document format) is a standard that many have embraced including Germany who mandated a law saying ODF must be used for public administration documents
- Prevents using a dozen different formats and using more propriatary formats such as the ones from Microsoft
Dell and Lenovo Sponsoring LVFS (Joe)
- Dell and Lenovo have become Premier Sponsors for Linux Vendor Firmware Service
- They are the first at this tier for LVFS
- That is $100,000.00 dollars per yer
- LVFS does just what it sounds like and provides a means of updating drivers for Linux based on the hardware that is released by vendors

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Security and Privacy

10 minutes

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Check This Out

10 minutes

Housekeeping & Announcements

Thank you for listening to this episode of mintCast!
If you see something that you think we should be talking about, tell us!

Send us email at [email protected]

Join us live on YouTube

Post at the mintCast subreddit

Chat with us on Matrix, Discord and Telegram

Reminder: If you are using Mint 22 or later, you have a Matrix client called Element installed by default. (I guess you don’t get it you upgrade??)

Next Episode – 2 pm US Central time on Sunday, May 24, 2026.
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Next Saturday we will host a Roundtable Live Stream. Please come and join us using the Discord voice channel at 2 pm US Central time on Saturday, May 16, 2026.
Get the Roundtable Live Stream converted to your time zone
Livestream information is at mintcast.org/livestream

Wrap-up

Joe – Tllts.org, linuxlugcast.com, [email protected], Buy Joe a coffee
Moss – Full Circle Weekly News, [email protected], Mastodon @[email protected], occasionally on HPR
Bill – [email protected], Bill_H on Discord, @[email protected] on Mastodon, also checkout the other podcast I am on, Linux OTC (with Eric, Majid & Charlie).
Majid – [email protected], AtypicalDoctor on Discord, and The Atypical Doctor Podcast and also Linux OTC and Distrohoppers Digest.
Eric – I can be reached by email at [email protected].
Charles – [email protected], Mr PDX on Discord
Jim– [email protected], GNU2Linux on Discord, The Linux Shortcut on YouTube
Charlie – ImmutableCharlie on matrix.org & Discord, [email protected]. Also on Linux OTC podcast.

Before we leave, we want to make sure to acknowledge some of the people who make mintCast possible:

Bill for our audio editing and for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
Archive.org for hosting our audio files
Hobstar for our logo,
.initrd for the animated logo on Discord
Londoner for our time syncs and various other contributions
The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>

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Episode 485 Show Notes