Linux Mint 27 Arrives This Christmas With Wayland Support and New Desktop Tools

Built atop Ubuntu and featuring its own desktop environment alongside XApp utilities, Linux Mint has long served both newcomers and experienced users. The project has now adopted a new release cadence, moving from six-month cycles to one major version per year. The numbering scheme reflects this shift, with versions now tied to the year of release—27, 28, 29—while boys' names replace the alphabetical girls' names that had been used since Ada in 2006 through Zena in version 22.3.

Linux Mint 27 "Adrien" marks the debut under this revised strategy. Arriving around Christmas and built on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, the release carries a five-year support commitment.

Wayland Reaches Production Status

The Cinnamon desktop environment's Wayland session has graduated from experimental status. Both X11 and Wayland now receive full support in the next Cinnamon release, with Wayland capabilities nearly matching X11 functionality. This positions Linux Mint's primary experience alongside mainstream distributions such as Fedora and Ubuntu in terms of Wayland readiness.

The implementation addresses core user interactions: window and menu rendering, prevention of focus stealing, and resolution of crashes affecting Cinnamon, Muffin, cinnamon-session, and Xwayland. Multi-monitor configurations and KVM switches receive support as well.

Graphics improvements include hardware acceleration support, with GBM over EGL for NVIDIA cards, while HiDPI scaling now extends to cursors and Chromium-based applications including Slack and VS Code. The screensaver, previously handled by a separate cinnamon-screensaver process, is now rendered by the compositor and managed by Cinnamon itself, functioning on both Wayland and X11. The legacy screensaver remains as a fallback for one release cycle before removal.

Desktop Environment Enhancements

File Manager Improvements

Nemo, the default file manager, gains a preview pane accessible via F7 or the status bar. The pane displays audio files, images, and videos alongside metadata such as capture dates and camera information. Interactive Search transforms into a filtered view that progressively narrows results as you type, replacing the previous behavior of jumping to the first match.

Native Screenshot Utility

A dedicated screenshot application arrives for Cinnamon. It captures individual windows with or without shadows, single monitors or all monitors simultaneously. Users can crop images before saving or copying, with the tool handling shadows appropriately for windows that render their own titlebars versus those relying on system-provided ones.

Library Redesign

The Library, which presents the XApp application Thingy on the desktop, undergoes redesign to organize recent documents by type rather than by the opening application. A sidebar contains predefined groups that users can display, hide, and reorder, with the ability to create custom groups based on file type and restrict them to specific directories. Individual items can be deleted, and the entire recent documents history can be cleared in one action.

System Administration and Installation

Unified Installer

Linux Mint adopts the live installer already in use by Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE), replacing Ubiquity. The new installer manages OEM installations, BIOS and EFI systems, Secure Boot, and LVM and LUKS configurations.

Sleep and Power Management

Hibernation returns to Linux Mint 27 following its removal from Ubuntu. A new "Sleep Modes" page in the System Administration tool simplifies setup, though a large swap partition remains necessary. The page introduces Hybrid Sleep, which suspends the machine while writing the session to disk, and Suspend-then-Hibernate, which begins as a normal suspend before transitioning to hibernation when battery reaches critical levels.

Kernel Management

Kernel management has relocated from the Update Manager to the System Administration tool on both Mint and LMDE, organized around kernel series. Users track specific series, specify how many older kernels to retain, and allow weekly automated cleanup or perform manual cleanup as needed. A History page documents all changes. Custom, OEM, and Real-Time represent some available kernel series that can be tracked, while untracked series are removed during cleanup unless their kernels are exempted.

Account Management

User account settings now reside in the System Administration tool, which handles user management and account details. Features include home directory encryption during account creation, webcam selfies with mirror functionality, and HiDPI-compatible avatars.

New Core Applications

System Monitor

Superlight serves as the new system monitor, with graphs tracking CPU load, memory and swap consumption, GPU usage, network traffic, disk activity, temperatures, and fan speeds. A dedicated Battery page displays status and charge history. An app page and process list accompany these views, with configurable and sortable columns that persist across sessions. The Storage page presents usage breakdowns and provides quick access to functions like trash emptying, cache clearing, and file system access.

Terminal Emulator

Velocitty becomes the default terminal for Linux Mint, offering tab overviews in the style of Ghostty and Ptyxis, color palettes, and tabs that can be reordered, moved, and detached. Path shortening is supported, and tab colors can indicate root sessions, remote sessions, and running processes. Custom tabs accept assigned names, colors, or commands.

EPUB Reader

Xepub provides dedicated EPUB book reading functionality, supporting chapter navigation, search, bookmarks, and zoom controls. Font selection is available, and the application remembers reading position. Word selection opens a menu enabling dictionary, Wikipedia, or translator searches, with the search engine being user-configurable.

Calendar and Alarm Applications

Calendar, a new application from the Clockenstein project, connects to local calendars, Google Calendar, and CalDAV servers such as Nextcloud. Users can create and edit events, with sync errors on remote calendars displayed and unreachable calendars becoming read-only. Reminders can be dismissed or snoozed, delivered by a separate daemon and notification agent even when the app is closed, with Cinnamon clock applet compatibility maintaining event visibility in the panel.

Clocks, still under development at the time of previous updates, appears in the September preview as an Android-inspired alarm application from the same project, featuring recurring alarms and custom sounds.

Archive Manager

Unfold simplifies archive handling as a portable archive manager enabling viewing, creation, and extraction while leveraging 7zip and 7zip-RAR for backend operations. Encrypted and password-protected archives receive support, and the application is released under GPLv3+.

Additional Updates

• WPA3 and OWE support in Cinnamon
• Fingerprint login in Slick Greeter without requiring Enter key press
• New "Sensors" page in System Reports displaying fan speeds and temperatures with automatic refresh
• Mint-Y theme refresh featuring improved dark colors and contrast, plus rounded frames, scrolled areas, treeviews, and listviews

Release Timeline and Variants

Linux Mint 27 is scheduled for release around December 24 on Christmas Eve. The distribution will be available in three officially supported variants: Cinnamon (the flagship), MATE, and Xfce.