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Finally. All the pieces are coming together for Wayland to truly be the actual future for Linux, even Linux Mint are now moving forward with it in their Cinnamon desktop.

News comes from their October 2023 overview post, which amongst other things, gave a mention of their new Wayland work. Mint's Clem notes work has "started on Wayland" and that it is "one of the major challenges our project had to tackle in the mid to long term". They have Cinnamon running on Wayland now too as shown in their screenshot:

Something to keep in mind though is with the Linux Mint 21.3 release coming it won't be the default session, and they don't expect it to be the default any time soon but they want it to finally be ready and so it will be included as an experimental option that you'll be able to pick from the login screen.

They've set up a Trello board you can follow on the progress and they don't think Wayland will be fully ready before 2026 so they're giving themselves two years to identify and fix up all the issues as they continue working on it.

Linux Mint 21.3 is due to release around Christmas time / late December 2023.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
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16 comments
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Linux_Rocks Nov 1, 2023
This is cool, but hopefully it works well enough to actually use though. lol

I was considering switching to Kubuntu, but my audio with it has crackling. While in Linux Mint it just works straight away with no troubleshooting or fixes. It might not be a big deal to fix, but I'd rather use a distro that works better straight away (even with something small like that).
wvstolzing Nov 1, 2023
Nice, and Xfce will probably have support even sooner.

By the way -- I haven't looked yet, but if you want good entertainment, be sure to check out the phoronix forums w/ respect to this bit of news, if/when it shows up there. The wayland quarrels over there tend to be hilarious.
QuoteAs you can see on the board many things are missing or broken but we’ve got a functional session with window, applications and workspace management. We’re able to log in, run most apps, manipulate windows, workspaces, nemo, the panel etc..
Still early (the Trello board identifies some significant missing features, like screen capture), but great news.

I wonder how they will implement screen capture permissions. Every compositor seems to do it differently. I like GNOME's implementation the most; loudly indicating when the screen is being captured in the top right.
dziadulewicz Nov 1, 2023
This is very late and should already be hurried IMO. To put all possible resources to get Wayland's going fine on Linux Mint. Until it works, Linux Mint is certainly not an alternative to much more modern Ubuntu ecosystem by default..
torham Nov 1, 2023
I'm glad they aren't trying to push it as default until it is more mature. Projects always tend to do this on Linux and the users are expected to live through the buggy transition, I feel like we are always in constant beta.
Steven Nov 1, 2023
Personally, I'm glad they are taking a more considered approach. Linux Mint has been my full-time desktop for years for work and personal use, and if it were ever to become unstable or difficult to manage due to Wayland, then that would create significant issues. Using Mint in critical environments that demand stability and privacy has always worked out incredibly well and has not let me down. Using distros that use Wayland in those environment risks too much for my clients and for myself. If I want to play around with them on a virtual machine, that's fine, but, for me, this approach is why Mint is the choice for my company and for my family.

Cheers!
DerpFox Nov 1, 2023
Does that mean Wayland is now usable for every one? Is screen sharing/capture a thing now? Has Wayland finally stopped in their stupid way of making everyone recode the wheel and integrated some component in its default package?

edit : How about accessibility? Has there been something done about that?


Last edited by DerpFox on 1 November 2023 at 6:55 pm UTC
Marlock Nov 1, 2023
Quoting: pleasereadthemanualI wonder how they will implement screen capture permissions. Every compositor seems to do it differently. I like GNOME's implementation the most; loudly indicating when the screen is being captured in the top right.

this might prove useful:
https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2023/03/xwayland-video-bridge-created-to-improve-linux-screen-sharing/
Marlock Nov 1, 2023
Quoting: dziadulewiczThis is very late and should already be hurried IMO. To put all possible resources to get Wayland's going fine on Linux Mint. Until it works, Linux Mint is certainly not an alternative to much more modern Ubuntu ecosystem by default..
They are an Ubuntu derivate, Cinnamon is a Gnome derivate, and Muffin is a Mutter derivate.

They waited for upstream to do enough work for things to look like they're working there.

Then recently they did a big Muffin rebase over a fresh version of Mutter, which captured most of the wayland work done there by Gnome devs (and severely reduced the amount of custom things done in Muffin differently from Mutter, making it easier to do new rebasing moves).

And then this announcement shows they got to work on Cinnamon.

And a comment on the announcement from a user says only a few X-apps need extra work making them run as expected u der wayland... like just four of them... the restis probably running over Xwayland, but if they do run fine that way that's enough to be a non-issue for their i initialmigration effort.

Then Clem replied noting that a lot of work left to do is on taskbar, menu, control panel, etc, which makes sense.

Anyway, as long as Ubuntu and Debian don't suddenly remove x.org from repos then Mint should be fine, but I agree this is high priority and have commented on their new article to that effect.


Ubuntu's modernity doesn't mean much for usual Mint users. Unless being on X.org becomes a tangible issue they'll wait around until the work is done and migration happens without pain, which is Mint's way of doing things.


Last edited by Marlock on 1 November 2023 at 9:52 pm UTC
Shmerl Nov 2, 2023
Starting on Wayland is good, but judging by how long it took KDE Plasma to get to decent state, it will probably be a long road. Still nice to see some progress.
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