Why my favorite Linux distro is slowing down – and I’m thrilled about it

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ZDNET's key takeaways

• Linux Mint will be slowing down how often it releases its namesake distro.
• We'll still see the next distro not long after Ubuntu 26.04 appears.
• Mint will continue to support X11 and Wayland for now. 

My favorite Linux desktop distribution, Linux Mint, is considering slowing down its release cadence. That's because, as lead developer Clement "Clem" Lefebvre explained, while releasing often has worked very well, it produces "these incremental improvements release after release. But it takes a lot of time, and it caps our ambition when it comes to development. … [so] We're thinking about changing that and adopting a longer development cycle."

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So, what does that slower future look like? Well, the next release will still follow the expected Ubuntu 26.04 release in April. That's not to say the forthcoming Mint 23 will look exactly like Resolute Raccoon, Ubuntu 26.04. It won't. Clem and company have always gone their own way. 

The biggest difference is that Ubuntu is shifting over once and for all to the Wayland window manager from the almost 40-year-old X11 Window System. Mint won't be doing that. Instead, Clem said Mint would keep X11 as long as it "works best for most users."

Wayland vs. X11

The differences between these two popular windowing systems are profound. They do the same job -- drawing 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 (typically Xorg) handles drawing, input, window management, and many legacy features in a single, aging stack. Wayland is a newer family of protocols in which the compositor (Mutter, KWin, wlroots-based, etc.) is in charge. In Wayland, applications draw their own content directly via modern APIs such as OpenGL/Vulkan, while the compositor composites finished buffers.

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They also handle security very differently. Under X11, any client can snoop on or interfere with others: it can see global keystrokes, read the contents of other windows, and inject input events. This makes it trivial to write applications like keyloggers and screen scrapers. That same power is also a security concern. So, Wayland deliberately removed those capabilities. Clients cannot read each other's buffers or keystrokes, and features such as screenshots, screen sharing, and remote control go through controlled interfaces, making it much harder to build useful applications of this kind and also making abuse of the desktop much more difficult.

That doesn't mean you can't build such apps in Wayland. It just takes more elbow grease. For example, the Mint team is building a new Cinnamon, Mint's default desktop screensaver, that can run natively under both X11 and Wayland. Today's Cinnamon screensaver is a standalone GTK application that only really makes sense in an X11 environment, where the X server keeps it on top of everything else when the screen locks.

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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 the panel, menus, and applets. That shift should deliver smoother lock animations, a more integrated look, and "full Wayland support." Lefebvre describes this as the "last missing piece of the puzzle for Cinnamon to fully support Wayland."

Mint isn't about to flip 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 force it on unwilling users. As with previous big changes, Mint's stance is that it will eventually adopt whichever stack "works best for most users," even if that means X11 and Wayland coexist for some time.

What else to expect

Under the hood, the project is also quietly reclaiming territory that most users never think about until something breaks: User and account management. Lefebvre laments that most Linux desktop environments have built their own user-administration panels, even though this is "typically an area which belongs to distributions" and one that desktops "cannot be and certainly isn't properly handled" upstream.

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In the next Mint release, a new Administration Tool (mintsysadm) will take over user administration and account details in editions where those desktop-specific tools can be hidden. The idea is to focus on the tasks that actually matter on a typical Mint system. This includes creating users, allowing them to set their own passwords, and completing account setup without further admin intervention.

That re-centralization comes with some tangible perks. Home directory encryption, previously available only at installation time, will be fully supported when creating new user accounts. This makes it much easier to retrofit encryption onto existing systems.

 The new account UI also brings modern niceties that desktop users now expect: webcams work properly for avatars, including live previews and an option to mirror the image, and avatar images get full HiDPI treatment so they look crisp on contemporary displays.

Taken together, these moves underscore Mint's self-image not just as a "distribution" but as a coherent operating system and user experience, with enough in-house engineering to avoid being boxed in by desktop decisions it disagrees with.

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Lefebvre argues that Mint's "slow and steady" approach is one of its core strengths -- incremental evolution that sometimes irritates users but never fundamentally breaks the experience they signed up for. Another, 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 creating Cinnamon in response to a GNOME 3.0, because "it didn't feel like GNOME."

The trade-off is that a rapid-release treadmill limits how ambitious Mint can be. With a new LTS base coming next cycle and, as Lefebvre jokes, the team "just ran out of codenames," Mint is treating this moment as an opportunity to stretch its timeline. Details on what "longer" means remain unclear. I'd guess Mint will slow to one release a year instead of two. I still expect, however, to see the next Mint to appear shortly after Ubuntu 26.04 ships. My best guesstimate is May 2026.

Record donations 

If Mint is going to ask users to trust it through a slower but more opinionated evolution, it helps that the project's financials are moving in the right direction. Unlike many other popular Linux desktop distros, Mint has no corporate backing. It's entirely paid for by donations. 

So when December 2025 brought in $47,312 in donations from 1,393 individual donors, a number Lefebvre calls "unprecedented" and "humbling," and one he says makes him "really proud of this community," that's a big deal. The project also counts 2,017 patrons on Patreon contributing a combined $4,900 per month. That may sound penny-ante, and it is compared to the multi-million dollar funding rounds we see out of Silicon Valley, but Lefebvre and his team make it work. 

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That money directly supports keeping Mint independent of corporate agendas and comfortable rejecting technologies it doesn't believe serve its users well. It also enables the project developers to spend serious time on unglamorous but necessary infrastructure work. For example, because a flood of AI bots made Mint's forums "slow and unreliable" for human visitors, Mint upgraded its forum server with 10x the CPU and twice the bandwidth.

Mint's decision to treat bots as a denial-of-service problem rather than a growth metric fits neatly with its broader philosophy: optimize for actual users, not AI. For a project that has built its brand on being the "it just works" desktop for people fleeing other operating systems or more experimental Linux distros, the signal to its community is reassuring.

None of this adds up to a flashy reinvention of Linux Mint. Instead, it sketches a future where the distro becomes even more itself: conservative in what it exposes to users, stubbornly independent when upstream moves clash with its design sense, and willing to invest in the boring plumbing that holds a desktop together.

For desktop Linux users who chose Mint precisely because it avoids sudden, jarring changes, that might be the most important news of all: the future of Linux Mint looks a lot like its past, with just a bit more time between releases. I like this plan. I like it a lot.

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