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PayPalAlong with receiving an unprecedented amount of donations recently, the Linux Mint team are looking at slowing down their release cycle.
In a fresh blog post from founder Clem Lefebvre, they note how December saw donations from over a thousand people which is the most they've ever seen. Nice to see the project so alive and well, as overall Linux Mint is a great no-fuss distribution.
There's more to go over - but starting with the big bit, they're likely to slow down their release schedule. Why? As Lefebvre said "With a release every six months plus LMDE, we spend more time testing, fixing, and releasing than developing" so they're currently thinking on "changing that and adopting a longer development cycle". It does make sense, six months is a pretty rapid release schedule, especially for a distribution that doesn't have the vast resources of Canonical or Red Hat.
Pictured - Linux Mint
In other Mint news their team are also working on adding user administration and account details into their Administration Tool (mintsysadm). Additionally, they're also planning to implement a completely new screensaver for the next Linux Mint release, since the current one only works in X11. And since everyone is moving over to Wayland, they need it to work fully. With the newer one they plan to have it working with both X11 and Wayland, be rendered natively by Cinnamon's window manager and as a result be better integrated and give a smoother transition for users during screen locking. They said this is actually the last piece of the puzzle for Cinnamon to have full Wayland support.
On top of that they're also working on adding support for keyboard layouts that don't match the physical keyboard.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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Last edited by Stella on 12 Feb 2026 at 12:51 pm UTC
A bit of story and context: the PC of some of my relatives are on Mint Cinnamon and that DE is rougher than usual in this release cycle (Mint 22 series, which is based on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS). Several times they couldn't put their computer to sleep / suspend (the option wasn't there) and had to call me to help them. That bug got fixed on 22.3 (their latest point release), but then another one showed up: the Shutdown button sometimes doesn’t respond – they click on it and nothing happens (thankfully, this one is much more rare).
In the end, both of those cases could be solved via terminal, but for people that are not tech-savvy (most of Mint's target audience) issues like that are show stoppers. I'm a Mint user too, but I'm on Xfce and haven't faced these bugs, so it's clear those are Cinnamon issues.
And to be fair, it's been a while since many Mint new features are purely aesthetic (how many times they have tweaked their theme in the last three years, for instance?), which to me felt more like they were doing for the sake of doing it; just to show others they are busy. This new slower approach is coming for the best, I believe, and will surely bring more solid and battle-tested changes.
GustyGhost 2 hours ago
Quoting: GustyGhostHonestly, they should just mainline LMDE and drop the Ubuntu derived version. Mint team spend way too much time correcting for Ubuntu's interesting choices.Agreed. Having LMDE as their main version would be wonderful, especially if it came with all Mint flavors: Cinnamon, Xfce and MATE. Sure, we can always install any desktop environment on top of a fresh install of LMDE or any distro, but it would be much more polished if it came with the Debian base + Mint goodies + your DE of choice right at the start.
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