Mint 27 to land before Christmas, with stable Wayland display upgrades, as punters try out Cinnamon 6.8

Linux Mint 27 is expected next month, and it's starting to take shape. Its flagship desktop, Cinnamon 2.8, is already available.

The team behind the popular, beginner-friendly Linux just released Cinnamon 2.8, which will be the default desktop in Mint 27. Since 2014, Linux Mint versions have been based on the LTS releases of Ubuntu. Since a new LTS, Ubuntu 26.04 "Resolute Raccoon" arrived in late April, that means that a corresponding version of Mint is in development.

The Mint project blog post last month revealed the codename: "Adrien." This is the first male codename since Mint 1.0 "Ada" in 2006, based on the first ever Ubuntu LTS release, 6.06 "Dapper Drake", but the project has run through the whole alphabet since then (except for the letter “Y”.) That blog also revealed it will have a new alarm clock app, but the subsequent Mint Blog post imparted more information.

The Nemo file manager will gain a preview pane, there will be a new and much more capable system resource-monitor program called "Superlight", a new simple manager for compressed archive files (Zip and so on) called "Unfold," and a new, theme-able terminal emulator called "Velocitty." Mint also has a new Community Website, which uses GitHub to manage logins and eliminates the old website's dependency on PHP.

Probably the most significant new feature, though, is that Mint 27 will restore system hibernation. Ubuntu supported hibernation in its early releases, but it has been disabled as standard since 12.04 "Precise Pangolin." Enabling it again is regularly discussed, for instance back in 2020. As we discussed in some detail a year ago, it's a complicated subject and there's a lot that can go wrong.

It seems that Mint's Clément Lefebvre feels he can sort this, and we hope it works out. Support is included in the new version of Cinnamon, among a host of other changes. Its Wayland support is no longer experimental, although the X11 session is still there so users won't be forced to use the new system. The Network Manager applet has better, simpler VPN support and Wi-Fi encryption handling. There are multiple improvements across the desktop: better handling of sound devices, keyboard input layouts, touchpads and gesture support, HiDPI display handling, and better search in the Settings app. The window list control has been upgraded, more things happen in the background for faster desktop starts, and it has better handling and storage of authentication and credentials, including the same Rust-based "oo7" secret store we mentioned in Fedora 45. Screensaver handling is also mentioned – this is particularly problematic under Wayland, as XScreensaver maintainer Jamie Zawinski has covered with some feeling. The Mint blog mentioned this at the start of 2026, when Lefebvre announced the new, slower, annual release schedule.

LXQt 2.5

Cinnamon is not the only desktop environment that has moved to embrace Wayland while also maintaining its support for X.org. Almost exactly two years ago, we reported that the LXQt 2.1 included preliminary Wayland support. That project is very much still in active development, led by Jen-Lee "PCMan" Hong, and version 2.5.0 just appeared, almost simultaneously with Cinnamon 2.8.

Before LXQt, "PCMan" developed the LXDE desktop – which is still around. There's an LXDE spin of Fedora 45, the Raspberry Pi OS uses some of its components, and last year when Debian 13 was released we also noted that its terminal emulator, LXTerminal, had just been updated. This release of LXQt removes its last dependency on an LXDE component – until now, it still used the old .

LXQt 2.5 is based on Qt 6.10, and it draws upon some of the components of KDE Plasma. One of these is libkscreen, which manages screens for Plasma. Version 6.8 of this drops X11 support – as does Plasma 6.8 itself – and that broke LXQt's applet. The team are looking for a workaround and plan to fix this in a minor point release. Aside from this, the desktop's taskbar-style panel has improved sizing support, icon handling, and auto-hide, but most of the improvements in this release are in around its QTerminal terminal emulator.

New LXQt versions usually appear twice a year, around April and November, so this version will likely be in Lubuntu 27.04 in about five months – and available in many other distributions, too. ®