Linux Mint 21.3 to Ship with Cinnamon 6.0 and Experimental Wayland Support

The Linux Mint project announced today in their monthly newsletter that they’ve started working on implementing a Wayland session for a future release of the Linux Mint distribution, to be initially available in Linux Mint 21.3.

As I reported a couple of months ago, Linux Mint 21.3 is planned for release on Christmas 2023, but there were no details at that moment in time about its new features except that it would bring a new version of the Cinnamon desktop environment.

Today, Linux Mint project leader Clement Lefebvre has confirmed that Linux Mint 21.3 will feature the Cinnamon 6.0 desktop environment, which will come with initial support for the Wayland display protocol. That’s right, Linux Mint 21.3 will be the first Linux Mint release to offer a Wayland session, but in an experimental state.

The default session will still be the X11 one, but users who want to try Wayland can do so by selecting the “Cinnamon on Wayland” session from the login screen. The featured image above shows Cinnamon running on Wayland.

“The Wayland session won’t be as stable as the default one. It will lack features and it will come with its own limitations. We won’t recommend it but you’ll be able to give it a shot if you want to and it’ll be there for interested people if they want to give us feedback,” said Clement Lefebvre.

I said before that “2024 is the year of the Wayland desktop”, but Clement Lefebvre doesn’t think Linux Mint needs Wayland support before 2026 when the Linux Mint 23.x series of the popular Ubuntu-based distribution will be released.

So they have a couple of years to perfect the Wayland session before it becomes the default. By that time, I believe Xfce will also be fully Wayland compatible so that Linux Mint can fully switch to Wayland by default.

In related news, Clement Lefebvre also announced today that the Linux Mint team plans to use their “Romeo” unstable software repository to provide users with bleeding-edge features that will be implemented in future Linux Mint releases. Due to this change, Linux Mint’s unstable PPA will be deprecated.

The upcoming Linux Mint 21.3 release will also feature an updated Hypnotix TV viewer app that introduces new features like the ability to save channels as favorites, the ability to download and update a local version of the yt-dlp package to ensure that YouTube channels won’t break, along with support for libmpv for streaming YouTube.

Image credits: Clement Lefebvre/Linux Mint Project

Last updated 6 months ago