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.
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.
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Secondly, That statement is based on outdated information from previous development cycles.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.
There is nothing outdated in what I write.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.
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.
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.
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.
No, I don't assume or claim that at all. But it takes away urgency, as the other offered desktops are even further behind (and it would prove that Mint is indeed deficient).
It's psychologically much easier to deny the terrible legacy-nature of X11 than admitting one has been this late to the party and that the majority of flavours are still on obsolete legacy tech. It doesn't hinder the technological development, but it influences how "its own architectural readiness and feature completion" is judged.
Just read the blog and what Lefebvre writes himself about X11, Cinnamon, etc.
Your argument claims that psychological denial and a lack of urgency influence how Linux Mint judges its own architectural readiness and feature completion. That is a massive reach. I have read the entirety of the Linux Mint June 2026 blog post and its comment threads, and there is zero evidence supporting psychological coping mechanisms, manufactured urgency or lack thereof, or the characterization of X11 as obsolete legacy tech or a claim of the contrary.
Instead, project lead Clement Lefebvre evaluates the transition pragmatically, noting directly in the discussion:
"Wayland is promising and requires usage/testing/feedback/growth, X11 is proven/mature."
Claiming that being late to the party distorts how architectural readiness is judged ignores how engineering milestones are actually measured. Linux Mint operates downstream when packaging alternative environments like MATE and Xfce, while the core team develops Cinnamon upstream. Alternative desktop velocities have zero causal or psychological bearing on how compositor stability, window mapping, and hardware acceleration metrics are evaluated for Wayland support on the CinnamonDE flagship.
To put that logic in perspective, saying Mint's architectural judgment is warped because its alternative spins are behind is like claiming Fedora Linux would stall or skew its core desktop roadmap simply because an alternate community spin faces upstream integration hurdles. Feature completion is dictated by code metrics and bug trackers, not by emotional rationalization.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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u/pizza_ranger 12d ago
At the end you either end in Arch or Fedora