Episode 472 Show Notes

Welcome to mintCast

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

This is Episode 472!

Recorded on Sunday, November 9, 2025.

while the soldering iron is hot im Joe; … Bill, Got my Tail up, I’m Majid; … Eric; …Charles; a certified bibliophile, I’m Jim

— Play Standard Intro —

  • First up in the news: Mint Monthly News – October 2025,
  • Then, new distro news and updates, and more streaming stuff
  • In security and privacy: don’t trust every PPA!
  • 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 mintcast.org/show-notes

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The News

20 minutes

  • Mint Monthly News – October 2025 joe
    From the Mint Blog by Clem
    Cinnamon Menu
    Work continued on the Cinnamon menu applet. Configuration options were added to be able to move the search bar to the bottom, And to be able to position the system buttons in the sidebar:
  1. Troubleshooting Tools
    Despite our best efforts, things don’t always work out of the box, right? 🙂
    When troubleshooting issues and finding solutions you don’t only need to find people who are able to help you, you need to be able to give them the information they need to understand your problem and give you the right solution. The steps involved in troubleshooting a hardware-related issue usually are:
    Finding the cause of the problem
    Precisely identifying the device, component or driver
    Finding out what to do
    Applying the recommended solution
    The community (forums, chat, tutorials, etc..) helps with step 3, but you’re usually on your own with the command line for steps 1, 2 and 4. We worked on making these steps a little bit easier.
  • The “System Reports” tool was given a plethora of new features and it was rebranded as “System Information”. In addition to its “System Information”, “System Reports” and “Crash Reports” pages, the tool received 4 new pages to show you more information and help you troubleshoot common issues.
    • The “USB” page shows a detailed view of all your plugged-in devices. You can see their type, name and ID (which uniquely identifies the device and its manufacturer). Devices are grouped by USB controller, so you can see where each device is plugged and compare its connection speed and power usage with the controller’s max connection speed and total power capacity. This makes it easy to troubleshoot common USB issues such as slow transfers or random disconnections.
    • The “GPU” page shows information about your default graphics card and its support for hardware acceleration:
    • The “PCI” page gives you a detailed look at the internal components of the computer. The PCI ID and the driver in use are very useful when troubleshooting PCI devices.
    • In the “BIOS” page you can find information about your motherboard, BIOS version, boot mode and secure-boot.
  • A new tool called “System Administration” was implemented. Although its UI looks similar to the “System Information” tool, its goal is slightly different. This tool runs with admin privileges and focuses on administration. For the moment it only has one page called “Boot menu”: At the top you can show or hide the boot menu and set how long it stays visible before booting the default option. This is very useful if you’re dual-booting or if you’re using multiple kernel series. In the second section you can add boot parameters. This is sometimes needed when dealing with hardware/driver issues.
  • LMDE 6 EOL Joe
  • LMDE 6 will reach End of Life on January 1st 2026. Past that date the repositories will continue to work but the release will no longer receive bug fixes or security updates. To upgrade the 64-bit version of LMDE 6 to LMDE 7 visit https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=4571. The 32-bit version will unfortunately not be upgradable. Proper support for 32-bit was dropped by many upstream projects (Debian, Ubuntu, Mozilla, Chromium) so we cannot continue to support this architecture anymore.
  • XSI (XApp Symbolic Icons)Joe
    Although adwaita-icon-theme is still a dependency on libgtk, it no longer supports applications outside of GNOME. Some of the symbolic icons it provided were simply removed, leading to regressions in many projects who relied on them. For instance if you are running Cinnamon in LMDE 7 or Arch Linux right now, you can right-click your panel and see missing symbolic icons.
    To replace the Adwaita symbolic icons a new XApp project was started called XSI (XApp Symbolic Icons): https://github.com/xapp-project/xapp-symbolic-icons. All the XApp, Cinnamon and Mint projects switched to XSI.
  • GNOME 50 Ends the X11 Era After Decades (Majid)

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Security and Privacy

10 minutes

Shape 1 — Play Vibrations Transition Bumper —

Vibrations from the Ether

20 minutes (~5 minutes each)

  • Cilantro
    • Hi MintCast Team,
    • I noticed that the show notes page (https://mintcast.org/show-notes/)
    • currently stops at episode 468. The pages for newer episodes up to 471
    • exist, but they don’t seem to be linked from the show notes index.
    • Thanks a lot for MintCast — I appreciate your work!
    • Best regards,
    • Konstantin

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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!

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Wrap-up

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 Discord logo
  • 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!>

— Play Closing Music and Standard Outro —

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