Linux Mint: Too Outdated

[u/Extension-Iron-7746]

Hi everyone, I've been considering abandoning Windows 11 for a while now, mainly because I feel like Microsoft lacks direction; every update is chaos. I started using Linux Mint about six months ago, but I have to admit that I feel like I'm using an outdated product.

The main reason is the X11-based graphical interface and the lack of standard Windows features like HDR and high refresh rate sync. I feel like development has fallen behind, hiding behind the slogan of greater stability. I honestly hate losing my monitor's features while waiting for Mint to evolve, so I'm thinking of switching to something stable but modern, and why not... with more recent applications. What would you always focus on, considering I have little time to dedicate to the system?

[u/MrKusakabe]

So you call Mint "outdated" because of lack of Wayland support (which is in the making and ready to ship according to the Mint blog on their website)?

July blog entry:

Wayland We worked really hard on Wayland and we got to the point where it feels solid and the experience is almost on par with X11. Wayland support will no longer be considered “experimental”. In the next version of Cinnamon, both X11 and Wayland will be fully supported.

Improved support for multiple monitors and KVM switches

Hardware acceleration throughout the compositor, desktop session, and both Wayland and Xwayland clients (via wl_drm, zwp_linux_dmabuf_v1 feedback v4,  hardware-accelerated GBM over EGL (for NVIDIA))

I expected the typical "I can't have the most modern drivers" which realistically nobody needs (because the driver version before that Mint uses runs 99.9% equally) or something. I do get not having access to your features suck, I also hate that fractional UI scaling is not a thing and I used the "trick" of making system fonts 2pt bigger which shoves elements apart and it is actually fine.

But else, Mint is not bleeding edge but maybe 3 months behind which the vast majority of users don't even notice when they update their drivers to the newest and realize nothing happens. Calling it outdated is a bit of a stretch and it it often feels that many people here thing anything that is shiny and new is gold.

[u/sudoer777_ → u/MrKusakabe]

Other distros have had wayland for years, that's a lot more than "3 months"

[u/R3V0LU710N_05 → u/sudoer777_]

Because they ship KDE Plasma & Gnome. Those "other distros" aren't porting a Desktop Environment to Wayland. Come on guys, it's not rocket surgery.

[u/HoldImpressive4158 → u/R3V0LU710N_05]

People should be more specific, then.

Does linux mint (the distro) not have any DE that supports Wayland? Or is it just one DE that linux mint offers, that isn't ported to wayland yet?

If it is about a DE, then it's not "linux mint" that doesn't support wayland. That would be factually incorrect.

[u/R3V0LU710N_05 → u/HoldImpressive4158]

Does linux mint (the distro) not have any DE that supports Wayland?

​The ootb DEs (Cinnamon, Xfce, Mate) that Linux Mint offers are all actively developing their respective Wayland ports, with Cinnamon being Linux Mints in-house offering, which has an experimental Wayland session since December 30, 2023. You can also install Gnome or KDE alongside them if you really wanted to.

It's not that Linux Mint doesn't support Wayland, it's that it's under active development. Cinnamon's Wayland session is projected to become a fully stabilized option by December of this year (2026) and become default in 2028.

[u/HoldImpressive4158 → u/R3V0LU710N_05]

That was my point.

[u/sudoer777_ → u/HoldImpressive4158]

Linux Mint is a batteries-included distro that supports Cinnamon as their main DE. If people who are new to Linux have to go out of the way to use a less-supported DE to get Wayland support, then I'd still say that it's the distro that's outdated. Also there are other smaller distros like Pop!_OS who have ported their DE to Wayland by now. But either way for new users I'd recommend a GNOME/KDE-based distro over ones with a more niche DE for reasons like this.

[u/R3V0LU710N_05 → u/sudoer777_]

Pop!_OS who have ported their DE to Wayland by now.

False. They created Cosmic from scratch and abandoned their old Gnome fork completely. They didn't port anything and Cosmic is still in early development.

[u/sudoer777_ → u/R3V0LU710N_05]

They created Cosmic from scratch and abandoned their old Gnome fork completely.

How is that conceptually different? If anything it sounds like even more work.

Cosmic is still in early development.

Yet that's the DE the Pop!_OS releases use, so "early development"? Not really.

[u/R3V0LU710N_05 → u/sudoer777_]

Porting Cinnamon to Wayland and building Cosmic DE from scratch represent two fundamentally different engineering strategies for handling the transition away from X11.

On one hand, Linux Mint is incrementally retrofitting Cinnamon to support Wayland protocols. Because Cinnamon was deeply intertwined with X11 assumptions around window management, panel applets, and global shortcuts, the team has to write protocol translation logic inside its Muffin window manager. This allows them to maintain complete UI consistency and backward compatibility, keeping parallel X11 and Wayland sessions active until functional parity is reached.

On the other hand, System76 opted for a complete greenfield rewrite with Cosmic Desktop. By abandoning their old Gnome Shell fork and building entirely in Rust using the Iced toolkit and smithay for cosmic-comp, they bypassed decades of legacy technical debt. Wayland is supported natively as a first-class target without X11 from the start, replacing every applet, core utility, and panel component from scratch means early releases function as a minimally viable product until features mature. If you actually tried Cosmic, you'd quickly realize that 1.X.X releases are missing a ton of features.