Linux Mint will end experimental status for Wayland in its upcoming Cinnamon release. The change arrives with full support for both X11 and Wayland sessions. The next version is scheduled for release at Christmas 2026.
Project founder Clement Lefebvre said the Wayland experience now feels solid and is almost on par with X11. The decision follows years of gradual integration work by the team.
Cinnamon gains full HiDPI support, improved icons and cursors, plus fixes for Chromium-based apps. Additional features include window progress indicators, focus stealing prevention, and better multi-monitor handling.
Hardware acceleration now works across the compositor and both Wayland and XWayland clients, including NVIDIA GPUs via GBM over EGL. A redesigned screensaver also runs natively on Wayland.
Linux Mint 23 will follow the longest gap between major releases in the project's history. Earlier this year the team began shipping HWE ISOs with newer kernels such as 6.17.