Linux Mint adds new system monitoring and terminal emulation apps; brings back hibernation

[Linux Mint] has announced multiple updates, starting with the restoration of hibernation as a first-class sleep option, a feature the project notes had been largely absent from the distribution after Ubuntu dropped it from its available sleep modes. According to the announcement, a new page in the system administration tool is dedicated to sleep modes and is designed to make hibernation easy to enable and configure correctly, including the swap space it requires. The release also introduces support for hybrid sleep, which suspends the machine while saving the session to disk, and suspend-then-hibernate, which suspends first and hibernates once battery levels reach a critical point. The project frames the change around a familiar problem: suspend is fast and reliable but drains power, and a laptop left closed for two or three days can end up with a dead battery and a lost session.

Alongside the sleep-mode work, several applications are getting attention. The Nemo file manager gains a preview pane, toggled with F7 or a status-bar button, that handles audio, pictures, and video while displaying metadata such as capture date and camera model. A new system-monitoring application called Superlight offers graphs for CPU, RAM, swap, GPU, network, disk I/O, temperature and fan speed, plus per-application and per-process breakdowns, battery history, and a storage view that drills into files, Steam games and Flatpak usage. The release also adds Velocitty, a terminal emulator with a tab overview, palette theming, drag-and-drop tab reordering between windows, customizable named tabs, and color cues for root, remote and active sessions, as well as Unfold, a deliberately minimal archive manager built on 7zip and 7zip-RAR that supports their encryption formats.

In smaller news, the project introduced Xenity, a fork of Zenity 3.44 built on GTK3 that retains the original's features, appearance, and syntax. Xenity has been added to the Mint 22.x and LMDE 7 repositories, and all Cinnamon spices that previously relied on Zenity have been migrated to it.