I thought that, considering that Zara has been announced this month, and that we were already on September 12, Clem Lefebvre would not publish a monthly note of Linux MintI was wrong. A few hours ago posted the September note, which covers what happened in August, and we already know the first details of the Mint that will be given to us at the end of 2026. But perhaps more important is the information about the Debian-based edition due to its proximity.
Work has begun on LMDE 7, which will be codenamed Gigi. The goal for this release is to climb to the base of Debian 13, adding improvements from Linux Mint 22.2 and support for OEM installations. The latter was already implemented in 22.2. Furthermore, they remind us that support for the i386 architecture will be dropped and that they will release a beta version before the end of September. Among other things, they also want to upgrade to libadwaita-1.7.
Linux Mint moves towards Wayland
As development never stops, they are already preparing the release of Linux Mint 22.3, which we will see at the end of 2026. According to Clem, it will be a very short release, with the priority to include a new version of Cinnamon and deliver several work-in-progress items, such as the new menu, the status applet, and improvements to Wayland (header image is stock) that will expand support for managing keyboard overlays and input methods.
It's worth remembering that, although Wayland is the future, it doesn't currently work as well as X11, and X.Org hasn't received any patches or improvements for a long time. GNOME and KDE already use it by default, but if memory serves, the rest of the graphical environments—not counting some that depend on it, such as Hyprland or Sway—offer it as an option and are working on it, but it's not yet fully developed.
In any case, to sum up, LMDE 7 will soon arrive with the improvements of Linux Mint 22.2 and 22.3 will arrive in December.