As they announced in the February note, Linux Mint I was working on a screensaver that would be compatible with X11 and also with Wayland, which is becoming the current and future graphics server for Linux. March note The project, which covers what happened in February, has shown us what is seen in the header screenshot, saying that the new Cinnamon screensaver is ready and that many good news will arrive in this section.
The previous screensaver ran as a separate process within the session, was written in Python and C, used GTK, and was designed for Xorg. The new screensaver It's not a separate process. Cinnamon manages things directly., locking the screen natively with its own toolkit and widgets, as seen in the following image.
This screensaver is fully compatible with Wayland. Clem hasn't yet decided whether Linux Mint will switch to Wayland by default, but is considering the possibility.
The development process hasn't been easy. Although it features smoother transitions, they curiously encountered the same bug that plagued the old version for decades:
«What appeared to be a random race condition, causing the session to be briefly visible before the screensaver appeared upon resuming or opening the lid, was a problem we tried unsuccessfully to fix for years. While working on the new screensaver, we discovered the cause. It's now fixed, not only for the new screensaver but also, after extensive testing, as an update to the previous one."But it's already sorted out."
Other new features in Linux Mint this February
La The sensors page has been added to the system's reporting tool.It's a page that lists all the sensors detected by the device and automatically refreshes their values. There are CLI-based tools that do more or less the same thing, but anyone who has used one with a graphical interface knows how convenient something non-text-based is.
All these new features should arrive in Linux Mint by mid-2026, when the next version of the operating system is released. It's unknown whether by then they will have decided to continue with the usual release schedule or switch to fewer releases per year, something they also hinted at last month.