Cinnamon 6.8 will support Wayland – if you want it

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Next version of Linux Mint’s desktop has both kinds of display server

The latest Linux Mint blog says that its Wayland support is about ready for primetime – but X11 isn’t going away.

Linux Mint lead developer Clement Lefebvre has published the Linux Mint blog for June 2026, announcing that as of the next version of the Cinnamon desktop, it will officially drop “experimental” status for Wayland: this will be a fully supported way to use the Cinnamon desktop environment. You will have to be patient, though – the post says:

“The improvements and features mentioned in this blog post are planned for the next version of Linux Mint, which is scheduled for Christmas this year.”

The current release of Mint is version 22.3, which we looked at in January this year, and, as we said then, it shipped with Cinnamon version 6.6.4. The version of the desktop in development in the project’s Github repo is currently 6.7.4. So this suggests that Linux Mint 24 will arrive at the end of 2026, and that it will come with Cinnamon 6.8. Mint fans will have to be patient, but the Mint blog for March did reveal that the project was slowing down its release cycle.

The post discusses some of the issues the team is encountering with Wayland, such as around controlling the size and positioning of new windows, updating icons with progress bars, and so on. Earlier in the year, the Mint blog for February went into some depth on the problem creating screensaver support in a Wayland environment.

If you track such things, this is not shocking. For instance, this is something that XScreensaver creator Jamie Zawinski castigated Wayland for this at very amusing length, back in 2023.

Similarly, the May Mint blog discussed performance issues in detail with hard numbers, and showed the effects of different settings on dialog boxes and screenshot-grabbing tools. For us, though, what these insights into the development process illustrate is the Mint team’s determination to bring Cinnamon to Wayland without losing any of its rich functionality – however serious the challenges this presents.

And despite the effort going into Wayland, X11 is not going away. The blog says:

“In the next version of Cinnamon, both X11 and Wayland will be fully supported.”

Perhaps it’s paranoia, but it seems to us that there’s some subtext here, which we interpret as the next version will still support X11 – but after that, all bets are off. We hope we’re wrong on that front. ®