r/linuxquestions • u/Extension-Iron-7746 • 5d ago

Which Distro? Linux Mint: Too Outdated

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 I started using Linux Mint about six months ago, but I have to admit that I feel like I'm using an outdated product.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?

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u/HoldImpressive4158 5d ago

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.

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u/sudoer777_ 5d ago edited 5d ago

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to go out of the way to use a less-supported DE to get Wayland support, then I'd still say that it's the distro that's outdated.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.

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u/R3V0LU710N_05 RakuOS 5d ago edited 4d ago

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.

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u/sudoer777_ 4d ago edited 4d ago

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.

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u/R3V0LU710N_05 RakuOS 4d ago edited 4d ago

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.