Among the mainstream Linux distros, Linux Mint has been an outlier, spending many years easing Cinnamon and its users, into Wayland one careful step at a time while other distributions like Ubuntu and Fedora made it the default experience.
Now, that patience is paying off, as the project's June update reveals that Wayland will no longer be considered "experimental" starting with the next Cinnamon release.
Better late than never, eh?
Don't worry, both X11 and Wayland sessions will be fully supported starting with the next Cinnamon release, and the latter won't be the default session. Linux Mint's founder, Clement Lefebvre, said that the Wayland experience now feels solid, "almost on par with X11."
Of course getting here took longer than it did for other distros, but a project like Mint doesn't rush a major change like this without carrying out the appropriate prep work.
You will see the results of that in what's lined up for the new release.
Cinnamon finally has full HiDPI support, sharp icons, better mouse cursors, and fixes for bugs affecting Chromium apps like Slack and VS Code.
Similarly, window progress shows things like Nemo's (the file manager) file/folder copy progress in the panel's app button, and focus stealing prevention keeps other apps from yanking your attention away mid-task.
Multi-monitor setups and KVM switches behave better, and hardware acceleration now runs across the compositor, desktop session, and both Wayland and Xwayland clients, including GBM over EGL for NVIDIA GPUs.
They have been busy
Back in February, Lefebvre revealed the team was rethinking its release schedule altogether, since a new version every six months on top of maintaining LMDE left them testing and releasing more than actually building features.
By April, the decision was final, Linux Mint 23 got pushed all the way to Christmas 2026, the longest gap between major releases the project has taken. Part of that extra time went straight into Wayland.
Earlier, Lefebvre had called a redesigned Cinnamon screensaver the last missing piece of the puzzle for full Wayland support.
The old screensaver only ran on X11 as a standalone GTK app, sitting outside Cinnamon's own window manager. The new one runs on both X11 and Wayland, rendered natively by Cinnamon's own compositor.
The rest of that time bought more convenience for users. Mint started shipping HWE ISOs in May, giving people access to newer kernels like 6.17 on LM 22.3 without needing to wait for the LM 23 release.
All that's left now is the wait. Based on what's already landed, the next Linux Mint release looks like it'll be worth it.
