Linux Mint, the Linux desktop distribution that many of us actually like, is getting a fresh start - and a new naming scheme. Lead developer Clement “Clem” Lefebvre announced earlier this year that the team was considering slowing the release cadence because the twice-a-year cycle was time-consuming and constrained major changes. So Linux Mint 27 will arrive in your Christmas stocking. The developers officially changed the designation on Oct. 13th when Mint changed both its release cadence and numbering. Clem says the tough decision is paying off: “We’re taking on projects and implementing changes which would previously have been considered too large or ambitious.”
Earlier development snapshots were labeled Mint 23 “Alfa,” a placeholder while the team decided its release strategy. The final name is Adrien. Moving forward, release numbers will be based on the upcoming year. Clem explained, “We’ll no longer use point releases, so the release after that will be 28. You’ll upgrade from 27 to 28 to 29, and so on.” And instead of girls’ names, Mint will use boys’ names for distro titles. Because nothing says “modern Linux” like a gender reveal.
On Halloween, Clem announced the top changes in Mint 27. First up: hibernation returns to the supported desktop configuration through a dedicated Sleep Modes page in the System Administration tool. The page makes enabling and configuring hibernation easier, including addressing swap-space requirements. Clem explained why it’s a big deal: “When you close the lid of your laptop, it goes into a sleep mode called ‘Suspend’. This mode is very useful… but it has a major limitation: It uses power.” People forget it’s not really off, and eventually the laptop runs out of power - which is “worse than a normal shutdown. The session is gone, and the battery is empty.” Hibernation, by contrast, “saves the session to disk and completely shuts down the computer. No power is used. When you reopen the lid, the session is as it was, and so is the battery.” In other words, it’s the feature you didn’t know you needed until your battery died mid-edit.
Another new feature is Superlight, a fresh system-monitoring application replacing the older GNOME System Monitor. It comes with CPU, RAM, swap, GPU, network, disk I/O, temperature, and fan-speed graphs, plus per-application and per-process resource views. Battery-equipped systems also get charge and power-flow history. Its storage analysis is particularly interesting: it breaks down disk usage into files and folders, Steam games, and Flatpak applications. That brings common troubleshooting tasks - “What’s using the CPU?” and “Where did my disk space go?” - into one interface. Our reviewer checked it out on a Mint VM and likes it already. Shocking: a tool that actually tells you what’s wrong.
The Nemo file manager is getting a media preview pane, toggled with F7 or a status-bar button. It supports pictures, audio, and video, and displays associated information - for photographs, that can include capture date and camera model. Our reviewer likes this feature a lot, having done a lot of work from file managers going back to the classic Norton Commander and its Linux successor, Midnight Commander. Some of us are old enough to remember when file managers were the whole operating system.
You don’t need to ever touch a Linux shell via a terminal to use Mint. But if you’re an old-school Linux user who likes the terminal, Velocitty, Mint’s new terminal application, looks interesting. Its announced features include making recurring projects and SSH sessions easier to find and reopen. If you prefer other terminal programs, the reviewer’s latest fave is the Rust-based WexTerm; you don’t have to use Velocitty. Freedom of choice - what a concept.
Unfold is a new archive manager for viewing, creating, and extracting archives. It uses 7-Zip and 7zip-RAR and supports the encryption formats those backends handle, including password-protected archives. Its design goal is simplicity rather than a sprawling feature set. Because sometimes you just want to unzip a file without a PhD.
The new Mint uses Ubuntu 26.04 LTS as its foundation. Mint is also moving from Ubiquity to the Linux Mint Debian Edition live installer for installing the operating system. This fresh installer comes with support for OEM bulk-produced installations, installation on both BIOS and EFI PCs, support for Secure Boot, and LVM/LUKS configurations. For the Linux kernel, Mint 27 will use version 7.0. Which one exactly? Good question. We’ll see closer to Christmas. Wayland compatibility remains the goal, but X11 isn’t disappearing. As Clem said in June, “In an ideal scenario, we manage to make Wayland work just as well as X11.” But they’re not there yet. The central change is a cleanup of existing code. Mint’s longer cycle gives developers room to overhaul several parts of the desktop together, rather than squeezing individual improvements into six-month windows. As Clem put it in the September newsletter, “I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many changes and new features implemented for a single release.”
What that means for you and me: better laptop power management, more capable built-in utilities, and a more complete collection of everyday desktop applications. For example, expect the updated Mint to ship with GIMP 3.2.2 as its default photo editor, instead of Mint 22.3’s years-old GIMP 2.10. So yes, you’ll finally be able to edit photos without feeling like you’re stuck in 2018. Please accept cookies to view the comments powered by Disqus.