First up in the news: A retraction

Review of our predictions for last year, and what we predict for 2026

Then our much anticipated Wanderings

The first is from the mint monthly blog where we said there would be a way to upgrade to the beta of 22.3 directly from 22.2. This was a misunderstanding of the information, and is in fact not true. There is, as has been the case in the past no way to upgrade in place from any version of Mint to any beta. That has just never been a thing. The confusion stems from the line stating there will be an announcement when the links are available. If you want to run the beta, you will have to install it (Nuke and Pave)

The other thing is when Bill mentioned the new Cinnamon menu was currently available to use with 22.2. Bill was confused by an update he saw come down for an alternative menu, “CinnVIIStarkMenu” which is a very feature rich, traditional menu much like the Arc menu in Gnome, The Brisk Menu in Budgie, and the Whisker Menu in XFCE. The new menu will be available in the up-coming 22.3 release of Linux Mint Cinnamon.

Topgrade

topgrade is an intelligent, cross-platform (Linux, BSD, Windows & macOS) command-line utility designed to streamline the process of updating various software components on your system. Instead of manually running apt update && apt upgrade, dnf update, pacman -Syu, brew update && brew upgrade, pip install --upgrade, cargo update, or specific updates for tools like oh-my-zsh, topgrade automates this entire sequence.