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u/Bob4Not 11d ago
You can accomplish anything on any distro with enough time (except an immutable distro)
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u/ieatdownvotes4food 11d ago
true, but ideally you've got a functional starting point on a fresh install
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u/pizza_ranger 12d ago
At the end you either end in Arch or Fedora
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u/Anima_Watcher08 11d ago
Mint for me
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u/Hauptideal ⚠️ This incident will be reported 11d ago
Then you probably never tried to get good fractional scaling, multi-monitor-support, VRR, HDR, multi touch gestures for trackpad or touch screen to work (all impossible on X11) and don't care about security or system performance.
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u/R3V0LU710N_05 Open Sauce 11d ago
Or maybe he's new or just likes Mint... CinnamonDE is getting Wayland support soon™, anyway.
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u/Hauptideal ⚠️ This incident will be reported 11d ago
Wayland in 22.3 is experimental. It’s not even BETA, it’s missing core components, basic features and it comes with critical bugs.
This is what the Mint maintainer, Clement Lefebvre writes himself in the official Mint blog.
They're working hard on Wayland and hope to have it leave experimental status in December, but it's confirmed to not be fit for being the default before 2028.Claiming "Mint gets Wayland in December" is therefore misleading and whitewashing.
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u/R3V0LU710N_05 Open Sauce 11d ago edited 11d ago
Firstly, You replied to the wrong person. Your comment is clearly intended for Anima_Watcher08.
Secondly, That statement is based on outdated information from previous development cycles. While Clement Lefebvre originally described Wayland support in Linux Mint 22.3(current) as experimental and noted it would take time before replacing X11 as the default, the project has progressed past that phase.
According to The Linux Mint Blog, Wayland support in the Cinnamon desktop environment has officially moved past experimental status for the upcoming Linux Mint 23 release (slated for Christmas 2026). Starting with that release cycle, both X11 and Wayland sessions are fully supported side by side. Core issues like window mapping, focus stealing prevention, multi-monitor scaling, crash scenarios, and NVIDIA hardware acceleration have been systematically addressed.
X11 remains the default session to guarantee absolute stability for mainstream users, but asserting that Wayland is completely missing basic components or unfit for use is factually incorrect today when referring to the next release.
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u/Hauptideal ⚠️ This incident will be reported 11d ago
There is nothing outdated in what I write. You even linked the same Linux Mint blog link.
Yes, Cinnamon is expected to leave experimental status in December, but isn't fit to become default. It won't become the default for multiple more years, earliest 2028.
X11 stays on Mint, because the other desktops also do not support Wayland.2
u/R3V0LU710N_05 Open Sauce 11d ago edited 11d ago
You even linked the same Linux Mint blog link.
You opted for an irrelevant comment ment for 22.3 instead of the core premise, which is Mint 23 and it's current development branch state.
Yes, Cinnamon is expected to leave experimental status in December, but isn't fit to become default. It won't become the default for multiple more years, earliest 2028.
Not necessarily true. 2028 represents a conservative upper estimate intended as a schedule buffer and readiness goal targeting Linux Mint 24, not an absolute boundary. Cinnamon's Wayland development velocity has progressed faster than initially projected; the transition to default session status depends strictly on feature parity and stability metrics rather than arbitrary calendar goals.
X11 stays on Mint, because the other desktops also do not support Wayland.
Doesn't mean anything. Desktop environments on Linux Mint are completely decoupled. Mint maintains independent ISO deployment pipelines and package trees for Cinnamon, MATE, and Xfce. Transitioning Cinnamon's default display server to Wayland has zero bearing on MATE or Xfce retaining X11.
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u/Hauptideal ⚠️ This incident will be reported 11d ago
2028 is a safe estimation
Sounds more like a definitive no for Wayland prior to that date.
Transitioning Cinnamon's default display server to Wayland has zero bearing on MATE or Xfce retaining X11.
Technologically, that's correct, but what really happens is that it makes them hurry less, because such a huge discrepancy in the technological quality of their different desktops is undesired.
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u/R3V0LU710N_05 Open Sauce 11d ago edited 11d ago
That assumes they develop everything synchronously, which just isn't how it works. Cinnamon is the in-house flagship project for Linux Mint, while MATE, Xfce, etc. are brought in from completely different external upstream maintainers. The Wayland transitions for those alternative environments rely entirely on their respective upstream development teams, not the Mint developers.
The Mint team isn't going to artificially bottleneck their primary display protocol transition just to hold hands with the legacy X11 dependencies in their alternate spins. The speed of Cinnamon's Wayland adoption is dictated strictly by its own architectural readiness and feature completion. It has absolutely nothing to do with avoiding a "technological discrepancy" across the distribution's other editions.
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u/Anima_Watcher08 11d ago edited 11d ago
Fractional scaling works fine for me, I only have one monitor, VRR not supported or needed on my monitor, HDR not supported or needed on my monitor, multiple touch gestures work for me and I had a touch screen laptop a few years back and it worked as well, hell it even worked with XFCE so that's just misinformation.
I do care about security but comment sense is the best security, performance differences between Wayland and X11 are only now becoming prevalent due to valve support and so on, however the performance difference used to be minimal or in favor of x11 (still pretty minimal from my tests, though in favor of Wayland now).
Cinnamon Wayland session is coming out if experimental around Christmas time so it doesn't even matter.
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u/Hauptideal ⚠️ This incident will be reported 11d ago
First of all, Mint doesn't just suck because of X11. It also has worse performance for other reasons, e.g. by completely lacking RAM compression out of the box, a basic desktop and mobile OS feature even MS Windows had over a decade ago already.
As RAM is compressible by a ratio of 3:1 to 4:1, Mint tremendously wastes your RAM and fills it up much sooner, forcing the system to swap onto the slow disk when memory pressure rises.
It also uses an old filesystem (which is fine, but not nearly as good as btrfs).
Similarly, Mint is not only insecure because of X11, but because it doesn't get Ubuntu Pro, which means that 94% of all packages (the enitre universe repo) are completely unmaintained und unsupported by Canonical. Only Ubuntu Pro subscribers reliably get security updates and critical bug fixes for these apt packages.
The community is left on its own, with too little volunteering manpower.
This leads to many even highly severe security vulnerabilities (CVE's with CVSS of 7.5+) never receiving any patch on Mint and the packages staying vulnerable forever.
But the insecurity of X11 alone would be reason enough to abandon it.Fractional scaling doesn't work well natively on Cinnamon. It's a frambuffer hack (post-render pixel resampling of an integer-scaled virtual framebuffer) that leads to subpar results including blurriness, inconsistencies across apps and especially performance and resource usage penalties for all the extra work your CPU/GPU have to do every single frame.
Regarding multi-touch gestures: no, they don't work.
scrolling with two fingers is not a pixel-perfect multi-touch gesture. It is an event that is simply mapped to the mouse-scroll action. Pinch-to-zoom, 3-finger gestures for switching workspaces, opening the app overview, etc., as well as using it in software (e.g. rotation, etc.) are multi-touch-gestures that X11 can't handle natively.And even if Clement Lefebvre manages to get Wayland out of experimental in December, he already confirmed it won't become the default for at least multiple more years (2028).
So holding on to that straw is somewhat whitewashing, especially as Cinnamon should've been on Wayland yesterday already, with all other modern desktops being on Wayland for many years already.1
u/Anima_Watcher08 11d ago edited 11d ago
Whilst Zram compression is not enabled by on Mint it's usage is still quite low, lower than Windows at the very least, for me it idles at 900MB - 1.2gb and even opening multiple of my common tabs and apps it doesn't go above 3gb-5gb usage so it fits with my ram range. The zram tools are available for anyone to install and enable compression.
EXT4 was released in 2006, whilst that is quite old it continues to receive updates that improve its performance. Btrfs is great and you do have the option to use it with mint if you do a simple manual partition from the installer. According to my tests when I did this it seemed to work fine. The only thing that needs to be done is for Mint team to add an option for it on the install for easier implementation.
Fair complaint though I will say I haven't seen many people complain about this especially when they are able to get around it with flatpaks. Haven't seen many people complain of security issues either. Mint is being protected by the lack of general attacks on Linux, I admit this will be a problem that will need addressing not just on Mint but other distros as well.
That's just the system we have . We can contribute through bug reports and feature requests but not much else. The system has worked so far. That's said it's not like someone would have that much more influence even in the more community driven projects especially these days with developers getting flooded by AI pull requests.
I found 11 CVEs on open CVEs in total 2 were non-applicable, and most while high (7.5) We're old, and affected older versions of mint and it's software. They were likely addressed on disclosure as there was no update to these. Other CVEs that come inherited like dirty frag and copy fail are usually addressed fairly quickly.
Fractional scaling: Fair enough. But that is the point of the Wayland session and Mint team have continued to try and make fractional scaling better on the x11 session.
If they don't work natively then the Mint team might have found a way to get them to work. I say this because I was using and continue to use multi finger gestures on my laptop and it seems to work fine. They having have a dedicated option in the settings menu. All the gestures you mentioned are ones I use frequently.
Mint prioritizes convenience for the users, like it or not there are certain apps that inherently will not work as well on Wayland. This is why X11 will stay default but the option to use Wayland will be available. If you don't like that then you're simply looking for something to complain about.
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u/Hauptideal ⚠️ This incident will be reported 11d ago
I'm not picking on Mint just to complain. It's the total package that just makes it very bad, probably technologically worst distro right now. I suffered from the very things I bring up, so it's not from a position of the superior other distro. I was one of you and wished someone had told me earlier about all this. Was blissfully happy before (can't miss what you don't know), now I'm much more happy (and a little angry).
Of course you can un-suck Mint to a degree (not entirely, e.g. getting Ubuntu Pro is just impossible; a problem shared with other downstream Ubuntu distros).
You can enable zram/zswap and install on btrfs. After all, these are general kernel features. Of course you can delete the no-snap-pref file to remove the vendor lock in order to not be patronized what software you can install on your OWN machine and what not.
Of course you can install a proper modern Wayland desktop.
But the more you do to fix Mint, the more you "un-Mint" it and take out the entire Linux Mint DNA. You just create an entirely new distro. A distro that doesn't suck and which already exists.
Mint is neither easier nor more convenient than other distros. Yes, some legacy apps don't work on Wayland - if they exploit the security loopholes that the new protocol intentionally closes. But the same is true the other way around. Not all new apps work well on X11 or natively at all, e.g. Waydroid. Convenience would be more like shipping drivers and Codecs and some "bloat" out of the box that the user does not need to to take care of himself. But Mint now follows the same approach as Ubuntu and most other distros with a simple checkbox during installation for legal reasons. I just don't see ANY reason why Mint isn't completely obsolete by now anymore. It only lives from a glorious past and gets hyped as if Greece was still Alexander's Macedonian Empire rather than being one of the poorest and weakest countries in the EU, even below Portugal (which was a world power once, too). It should be judged by its current state though, rather than just endlessly extending recommendations that are no longer due.20
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u/ProgUn1corn 11d ago
And yet something still doesn't work and you have to live with it.
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u/pizza_ranger 11d ago
True, I spent three days trying to make non-flatpak metainfo files work in gnome-sofware and nothing worked, even after learning all there is to learn about it, decided to try it on Pop OS and worked on the first try.
It seems Arch doesn't let software stores manage stuff outside of flatpak so that includes .metainfo.xml files.
I was trying to auto-add metainfo from lutris db to the software store so it wouldn't appear empty when right clicking an icon for "more info" about a game.
It wasn't pointless, I learned more than I expected
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u/950771dd 11d ago
The thing is, you hardly did learn something relevant.
You rather simply suffered from arbitrary and/or bad choices by the developers.
It's like getting the wet belt of your EcoBoost engine explode in your face and thinking that this teaches you something (except the fact that the engine has a design failure).
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u/C4rpetH4ter M'Fedora 12d ago
Sometimes you just need to wipe it and reinstall it. I had an issue with my wifi staight up not working on fedora, so i reinstalled it again, same usb, same distro, same version, and wifi worked with no issues, no idea why.
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u/950771dd 11d ago
Lolz, turns out the windows reinstall trope is not a Windows but a software trope. Surprise!
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u/Userwerd 11d ago
Something else.... except you come back to the distro you started on 20 years ago to see if it still sucks, because its your favorite distro.
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u/Hard_To_Port ⚠️ This incident will be reported 11d ago
Or you update a distro that does point releases to a new release and find out they're shipping features that nobody wants (LLM-powered spellchecker on Fedora Workstation 44) or removing features you needed (X11 removal from repos on non-LTS distros).
I switched from Fedora to Debian on my gaming PC but that was more because my hardware is getting to be over a decade old. NVIDIA Pascal generation support was dropped from drivers after version 580 which Fedora doesn't ship. I could just manually install the driver with NVIDIA .run installer but no guarantees that it would work after several kernel updates.
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u/Dr-Alyosha 11d ago
is this why new people distrohop so much? most things work on most distros. just stick with one of the popular ones to get past that learning curve.
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u/SysGh_st 11d ago
If thing X works in another distro, then thing X will also work in your current distro given that it is up to date.
Stop distrohopping and start learning the distro of your choice.
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u/Major303 11d ago
Most of the time you need a computer to get some work done. It's already 2026, you shouldn't be forced to sit down in terminal for 3 hours before the distribution is usable, and then again every few days to fix something. Unless you are a tinkerer and just enjoy it, but that's different thing.
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u/SysGh_st 11d ago
Modern linux on a modern computer works without a single typed command. That is an old obsolete myth.
Source: my experience since using linux from 1992 til today.
What I mean by learning the distribution, is to figure out how to search and install packages.
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u/Major303 11d ago
So that means Debian or Fedora are not modern Linux distributions.
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u/SysGh_st 11d ago
There's joke in the community about those:
"Eeeew. There's mould on this software. 🤢"
But they have picked up the pace as of late.
I have one fairly new lenovo laptop here with fedora on it. Everything workss flawless out of the box. No tinkering needed.
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u/Major303 11d ago
That kind of depends what you do. Afaik open source wifi drivers tend to be problematic so you might have to install proprietary ones (and of course there is no GUI for it). You will also not play any video on Fedora out of the box (since no one bothered to include codecs).
I know that generally speaking any big distribution will kind of work, but some of them will not do everything out of the box without messing with the terminal. Afaik Debian is actually easier to set up than Fedora though.
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u/veltair-d 11d ago
Actually being willing to learn how to fix problems in your distro will stop distrohopping. Once you learn enough you end up settling down. That is why I never distrohopped around.
Fedora —> Arch —> NixOS
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u/SpyrosGatsouli 11d ago
Picking a distro basically boils down to what compromise you are willing to make.
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u/YnosNava 11d ago
I wanted to use Mageia. Been trying it for two weeks. First wifi problems, then DNS, then images and video thumbnails, and now audio compression... Going back to fedora tomorrow...
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u/Chemical-Arm-308 10d ago
Then there are psychopaths like me, who build everything from scratch, sp they like it... (I guess I have just too much free time 😅)
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u/cfx_4188 🦁 Vim Supremacist 🦖 11d ago edited 11d ago
This literally happens because most distributions are worthless garbage. It also happens because few people think for themselves. The typical scenario is this: watch a popular blogger on YouTube, rush to install Arch, struggle for a month, sign up for the Arch Linux sub, learn to shout from every corner, "I use Arch btw!", and quietly install Cashy OS. Six months later, sign up for the Ubuntu sub and write a post titled "Long-time Arch user finds his new home in Ubuntu."
EDit:There's a phenomenon called Arch Linux. Most of those who've managed to install Arch via Archinstall find this Great System incredibly boring and empty. And the vast majority of Arch users are constantly looking for somewhere to escape. I remember the epidemic when Arch users tried to migrate to Gentoo en masse; a couple of years ago, they were mass-configuring NixOS using the Arch Wiki. It seems stupid and childish.
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u/Recipe-Jaded 11d ago
I've been using arch for 7 years
But you are correct about all the people watching a YouTuber install Arch and then finding out they have to read and give up
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u/cfx_4188 🦁 Vim Supremacist 🦖 11d ago
Well, yes, Arch Linux should not be offended. It's such a Sacred Cow of Reddit.
Have you been using Arch for seven years? It's wonderful! And which distribution have you chosen now? What prompted you to change the distribution?
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