Linux Mint Cinnamon is finally Wayland ready

https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/07/linux-mint-cinnamon-is-finally-wayland-ready/

Publish Date: 2026-07-09 05:08:00

The next release of the Cinnamon desktop and Linux Mint is finally ready for Wayland – with it no longer considered to be experimental.

In their June round-up blog post, developer lead Clement Lefebvre mentioned that for the next version of Linux Mint due around Christmas time that “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”.

Just some of the noted improvements include:

Proper mapping (sizing and positioning) for new windows, applet popup menus and context menus.
Proper focus stealing prevention.
Many Wayland crash scenarios fixed in Cinnamon, muffin, cinnamon-session and Xwayland.
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)).
Full HiDPI support (crisp icons, fixes in mouse cursors, and bugs specific to Chromium apps such as Slack or VSCode).
Window Progress (this is what allows, for instance, to see nemo copy progress in the panel app button).
Root applications (run via pkexec) run as Wayland clients (not Xwayland).
Session fixes.

Meanwhile Cinnamon desktop also received some extra love:

A cinnamon-list-windows command was introduced to make it easy to list all open windows and to quickly see their position, size, HiDPI/app/backend info.
Muffin now rounds coordinates and dimensions for all Clutter actors. This guarantee crisp and precise rendering and fixes blur issues when applets or desktop components forget to do so themselves.
Support for systemd’s graphical-session. This boosts Cinnamon’s compatibility with many upstream projects.

Plus some other updates: