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- This will slow down how often Linux Mint releases its eponymous distro.
- We will see the next distro shortly after Ubuntu 26.04 appears.
- Mint will continue to support X11 and Wayland for now.
My favorite Linux desktop distribution, linux mintConsidering slowing down your release pace. This is because, as lead developer Clément “Clem” Lefebvre explained, while the release often works very well, it releases these incremental improvements after the release. But this takes a lot of time, and limits our ambition when it comes to growth. …(so) we are thinking about changing it and Adopting a longer development cycle.“
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So, what does that slow future look like? Well, the next release will still follow the Ubuntu 26.04 release expected in April. This doesn’t mean that the upcoming Mint 23 will look exactly like Resolute Raccoon, Ubuntu 26.04. This will not happen. Clem and the company have always gone their own way.
The biggest difference is that Ubuntu is shifting once and for all. wayland window manager since about 40 years old X11 Window System. Mint won’t do that. Instead, Clem said that Mint will keep X11 as long as it “works best for the most users.”
Wayland vs X11
The differences between these two popular windowing systems are stark. They do the same thing – creating windows and handling input – but they do it with very different architectures and trade-offs. X11 is a 1980s client-server display protocol in which a central display server (usually Xorg) handles drawing, input, window management, and many legacy features in a single legacy stack. Wayland is a new family of protocols in which the compositor (Mutter, KWin, wlroots-based, etc.) is in charge. In Wayland, applications pull their content directly through modern APIs like OpenGL/Vulkan, while compositors create composite buffers.
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They also handle security very differently. Under X11, any client can spy on or interfere with others: it can observe global keystrokes, read the contents of other windows, and inject input events. This makes it easier to write applications such as keyloggers and screen scrapers. That same power is also a security concern. Therefore, Wayland intentionally removed those abilities. Clients can’t read each other’s buffers or keystrokes, and features like screenshots, screen sharing, and remote control go through controlled interfaces, making it much harder to build useful applications like this and even more difficult to abuse the desktop.
This does not mean that you cannot create such apps in Wayland. It just takes more elbow grease. For example, the Mint team is building a new cinnamonMint’s default desktop screensaver, which can run natively under both X11 and Wayland. Today’s Cinnamon screensaver is a standalone GTK application that really only makes sense in an X11 environment, where the X server runs it on top of everything else when the screen is locked.
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Cinnamon’s own window manager/compositor will render the planned replacement directly. It uses the same toolkit that the project already relies on for panels, menus, and applets. That change should provide smoother lock animations, a more unified look, and “full Wayland support.” Lefebvre described this as “the last missing piece of the puzzle for Cinnamon to fully support Wayland”.
Mint is not going to reverse the default just because Wayland support exists. Lefebvre calls current Wayland support “experimental” and says the goal is “to be able to support it and start testing it as a potential solution”, not to impose it on reluctant users. Like previous major changes, Mint’s stance is that it will eventually adopt the stack that “works best for the most users”, even if that means X11 and Wayland co-exist for some time.
what else to expect
Under the hood, the project is quietly reclaiming an area that most users don’t think about until something breaks: user and account management. Lefebvre lamented that most Linux desktop environments have their own user-administration panels, even though this is “generally an area that belongs to the distribution” and an area that desktops cannot do “upstream” and is certainly not properly managed.
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In the next Mint release, a new administration tool (mintsysadm) will take over user administration and account details in versions where those desktop-specific tools might be hidden. The idea is to focus on the tasks that really matter on a specific Mint system. This includes creating a user, allowing them to set their own password, and completing account setup without any administrator intervention.
That re-centralization comes with some tangible benefits. Home directory encryption, previously only available at installation, will be fully supported when creating new user accounts. This makes it very easy to retrofit encryption onto existing systems.
The new account UI also brings the modern niceties that desktop users now expect: webcams work properly for avatars, including a live preview and the option to mirror the image, and avatar images get the full HiDPI treatment so they look crisp on contemporary displays.
Overall, these moves undercut Mint’s self-image as not just a “distribution” but as a consistent operating system and user experience, with enough in-house engineering to avoid disagreements over desktop decisions.
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Lefebvre argues that Mint’s “slow and steady” approach is one of its main strengths – incremental development that sometimes irritates users but never fundamentally breaks the experience they signed up for. The second, he says, is the project’s independence and willingness to “develop our own solutions when we’re not happy with the alternative,” whether that’s sticking to LTS bases, rejecting Canonical’s Snap packaging, or building Cinnamon in response to GNOME 3.0 because “it didn’t feel like GNOME.”
The trade-off is that the quick-release treadle limits how ambitious Mint can be. With a new LTS base coming in the next cycle, and as Lefebvre jokes, the team has “run out of codenames”, Mint is treating this moment as an opportunity to extend its timeline. The details of what “long” means are vague. My guess is that Mint will slow down to one release a year instead of two. However, I’m still hopeful that the next Mint will appear soon after Ubuntu 26.04 ships. My best guess is May 2026.
record donation
If Mint asks users to trust it through slower but more thoughtful development, it helps that the project’s finances are moving in the right direction. Unlike many other popular Linux desktop distros, Mint has no corporate support. It is entirely paid for by donations.
So when donations of $47,312 came in from 1,393 individual donors in December 2025, a number Lefebvre called “phenomenal” and “humbling,” and a number he said “made us really proud of this community,” it’s a big deal. The project also involves Patreon’s 2,017 patrons, who are collectively contributing $4,900 per month. This may sound strange, and compared to the multimillion-dollar funding rounds coming out of Silicon Valley, but Lefebvre and his team make it work.
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That money directly helps Mint keep it independent from corporate agendas and easily reject technologies it believes don’t serve its users well. It also enables project developers to spend serious time on non-glamorous but essential infrastructure work. For example, because a Flood of AI bots made mint platform “Slow and unreliable” for human visitors, Mint upgraded its forum servers with 10x the CPU and double the bandwidth.
Mint’s decision to treat bots as a denial-of-service problem rather than a growth metric fits well with its broader philosophy: optimize for real users, not AI. For a project that has built its brand as a “it just works” desktop for people fleeing other operating systems or more experimental Linux distros, the nod to its community is reassuring.
None of this adds up to the attractive reinvention of Linux Mint. Instead, it outlines a future where the distro becomes even more: conservative in what it exposes to users, stubbornly independent when upstream moves clash with its design sense, and willing to invest in the boring pipeline that puts desktops together.
For desktop Linux users who chose Mint precisely because it avoids sudden, jarring changes, this may be the most important news: Linux Mint’s future looks a lot like its past, with a little more time between releases. I like this plan. I like it very much.
