Linux Mint 22.3 was a very good release. It came out later than we anticipated, but it was very well received. The beta phase was longer than usual, but it allowed us to gather feedback, address many issues, and review some of the choices made during that time, in particular around the newly introduced Cinnamon menu and keyboard layout\/IM (Input Method) configuration.<\/p>\n
Keyboard Layouts and IM<\/strong><\/p>\n Work continues on improving input methods. It came to our attention that some users like to use layouts which do not match their physical keyboard when using IM. I spoke with someone who writes in both French and Japanese. I do this myself on an ANSI keyboard using French\/US and Mozc. He has different keyboards on different machines, some ISO\/French, some Japanese, and he doesn’t care about the physical layout. He just wants the logical layout to be French when writing French and Japanese when using Mozc.<\/p>\n This isn’t something we anticipated, but we want to support it going forward. We’re working on making it possible to set a specific keyboard layout when configuring an input method.<\/p>\n Forums<\/strong><\/p>\n I\u2019d like to apologize to our forum users for how slow and unreliable the forums were last month. The volume of traffic we receive is extremely high, and it’s mostly coming from AIs, bots, scripts, and web crawlers. It got to the point where our server couldn’t cope and people weren’t able to use the forums.<\/p>\n In addition to the Sucuri WAF, it took us a while to come up with an efficient way to filter bad traffic. If you’re getting 403 errors from the forums right now, please make sure your browser is up to date.<\/p>\n We upgraded the server to give it 10\u00d7 the CPU capacity and twice the bandwidth.<\/p>\n Users and Account Details<\/strong><\/p>\n For some reason most Linux desktop environments have come up with their own tools for user administration and account details. It’s a pity because this is typically an area which belongs to distributions and which cannot be and certainly isn’t properly handled by desktops. As a result these tools lack support for a lot of new use cases and they’re not well maintained.<\/p>\n In the next release, the Administration Tool (mintsysadm) will handle user administration and account details in editions where the desktop tools can be hidden.<\/p>\n \u00a0User management in mintsysadm focuses on the most common tasks. Once a user is set up, that user can set up a password and finalize the account without admin intervention. Home directory encryption, which until now was only supported during the OS installation, is fully supported during the creation of new user accounts.<\/p>\n Webcams are fully supported when taking selfies (i.e. you can see yourself before taking the snap, and decide whether to mirror the webcam or not).<\/p>\n Avatars come with full HiDPI support and look crisp on modern hardware.<\/p>\n Cinnamon Screensaver and Wayland<\/strong><\/p>\n The Cinnamon screensaver only works in X11. It’s a standalone application which runs in its own process and uses the GTK toolkit. X11 is responsible for making sure it sits on top of Cinnamon’s window manager and hides the windows when the screen is locked.<\/p>\n One of the goals for the next Linux Mint release is to implement a new screensaver which will:<\/p>\n The benefits are significant:<\/p>\n This is one of the big things we’re working on right now. I’m not showing you pictures yet until this is ready \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n Wayland support so far has been “experimental”. Once all the pieces are in place, we can support it and start testing it as a potential solution. We know there are pros and cons to X11 and Wayland, and we want to support both. Supporting Wayland doesn’t mean we’ll start using it by default, but it makes it a possibility. As always, we’ll end up using what works best for most users.<\/p>\n Longer Development Cycle<\/strong><\/p>\n If we look back at the last ten years and the projects we invested resources in, we see two things. Well, I see two things anyway, I hope you’ll agree \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n I think one of our strengths is that we’re doing things incrementally and changing things slowly. We are introducing change and sometimes it annoys some of our users, but we’re doing it in a way that doesn’t radically affect who we are or the user experience we provide.<\/p>\n Another important strength of ours, as I see it, is that we value our independence and we are able to react and develop our own solutions when we’re not happy with the alternative. We made some bold moves in the past, sticking to LTS, rejecting Snap, developing alternatives to a new GNOME that didn’t feel like GNOME, and I’m really glad we did. These decisions weren’t easy to make and some of them cost a huge amount of time and resources to implement. But looking back, I think they were key. I think we’re first and foremost an operating system: a product, a user experience. We’re also a “distribution”, but we’re not just a distribution.<\/p>\n Whether we “distribute” (for instance with KDE) or we actively develop solutions (for instance with XApp and Cinnamon), we spend a lot of time in release management. Releasing often is important because it means we get a lot of feedback and bug reports when we introduce changes. We follow the same process over and over again. It\u2019s a process that works very well and it produces these incremental improvements release after release. But it takes a lot of time, and it caps our ambition when it comes to development. With a release every six months plus LMDE, we spend more time testing, fixing, and releasing than developing.<\/p>\n We’re thinking about changing that and adopting a longer development cycle. As it happens, our next release will be based on a new LTS and we just ran out of codenames \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n Stay tuned, we’ll have more information on this. Obviously the codenames strategy doesn’t matter much, but we are very interested in adopting a longer development cycle.<\/p>\n Sponsorships:<\/strong><\/p>\n Linux Mint is proudly sponsored by:<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blog.linuxmint.com\/upload\/2026\/02\/shadow_users1.png\")
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