Linux Mint is working on adding Wayland support to Cinnamon

The Linux Mint project has announced that they’re finally working on bringing the Cinnamon desktop environment over to Wayland.

The work started on Wayland. As mentioned earlier this year, this was identified as one of the major challenges our project had to tackle in the mid to long term. Priority had been given to ISO tools and Secureboot over new features for 21.3 already, we felt it was time to invest some resources into Wayland as well.

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We wanted to have a clear picture of the work involved, so we wanted to start now. In terms of timing we don’t think we need Wayland support to be fully ready (i.e. to be a better Cinnamon option for most people) before 2026 (Mint 23.x). That leaves us 2 years to identify and to fix all the issues. It’s something we’ll continue to work on. Whenever it happens, assuming it does, we’ll consider switching defaults. We’ll use the best tools to do the job and provide the best experience. Today that means Xorg. Tomorrow it might mean Wayland. We’ll be ready and compatible with both.

I respect this position. Linux Mint has always been just a bit more conservative than many of the other desktop-focused distributions, and this has earned it a well-deserved reputation for being stable and reliable. I use Linux Mint on my gaming PC for that very reason (albeit with the Xanmod kernel) – during the little time I have to play games, I don’t want to deal with issues arising from using bleeding edge software.