I’ve been staring at my screen for the better part of this year, waiting for the other shoe to drop. It’s New Year’s Eve, and usually, this is when I do my “nuke and pave” ritual—wiping my drive to start fresh for January. But this time? I’m hesitating. Not because I’m lazy (okay, maybe a little), but because for the first time in a decade, my Linux Mint setup hasn’t actually degraded over six months of abuse.

Remember the dev update back in May? The one where the team finally drew a line in the sand regarding the Wayland session? At the time, it felt like typical developer optimism. They claimed the experimental tag was effectively just a formality for the upcoming summer release and that the “modern” session was ready for the masses. I scoffed. Loudly. I’d been burned by flickering windows and vanishing cursors too many times to trust it.

Well, I was wrong. Mostly.

The “Good Enough” Threshold

The biggest takeaway from that mid-year shift was the handling of fractional scaling. If you have a 4K monitor and bad eyesight like me, X11 has been a nightmare of blurry fonts or tiny UI elements for years. The May update teased a new implementation in Cinnamon 6.6 that bypassed the old GTK scaling hacks.

I switched my daily driver to the Wayland session exclusively in July. The difference wasn’t “seamless” (I hate that word), but it was stark. The sharpness is there. Finally. But it came with a cost that nobody really talks about: older apps behaving like spoiled brats.

Electron apps, in particular, were a mess initially. Discord would freeze if I looked at it wrong. VS Code had this weird jitter when scrolling. It wasn’t the OS’s fault, strictly speaking, but it was my problem to fix.

Fixing the Flicker

The team mentioned in the May notes that they were pushing upstream fixes to XWayland to handle these legacy bridges better. That’s great for the long term, but I needed my IDE to work now. I spent a weekend digging through config flags and realized that while Mint sets sensible defaults, it can’t magically force proprietary garbage to play nice.

I ended up writing a wrapper script to force specific rendering backends for my most stubborn apps. If you’re still seeing that weird black-box flickering on NVIDIA cards with the 560+ drivers, you might want to try this approach. It’s dirty, but it works.

#!/bin/bash

# A quick wrapper to force Wayland flags on stubborn Electron apps
# Save as 'launch-wayland.sh' and chmod +x

APP_BIN=$1
shift

# Check if we are actually in a Wayland session
if [ "$XDG_SESSION_TYPE" == "wayland" ]; then
    echo "Wayland detected. Forcing ozone platform..."
    
    # These flags force Electron to use the native Wayland buffer
    # instead of routing through XWayland, which kills the jitter.
    exec "$APP_BIN" \
        --enable-features=UseOzonePlatform \
        --ozone-platform=wayland \
        "$@"
else
    # Fallback for X11 sessions
    echo "X11 detected. Launching normally."
    exec "$APP_BIN" "$@"
fi

You just alias your apps to run through this. It solved 90% of my graphical glitches in VS Code. Why this isn’t a toggle in the System Settings yet is beyond me, but hey, that’s Linux.

The XApps Refactor

Another thing that flew under the radar in the spring announcements was the threading work on the Software Manager (mintinstall). It used to be painfully slow. You’d click “Install,” and the UI would just… hang out for a bit. Maybe grab a coffee. Contemplate existence.

The refactor they pushed effectively decoupled the UI thread from the Apt/Flatpak backend operations. It sounds like basic software engineering—and it is—but the impact on perceived speed is massive. I timed it. Loading the “Featured” page used to take about 4 seconds on my laptop. Now it’s instant.

It’s not flashy. It doesn’t make for a great screenshot. But it stops me from wanting to throw my laptop out the window, which is the most important metric for an operating system.

Where It Still Falls Short

Let’s not get too starry-eyed. The “May promise” of better multi-monitor support is still a bit janky if you have monitors with different refresh rates. I have a 144Hz main display and a dusty 60Hz secondary one.

On Windows, this just works. On Mint’s Wayland session, moving a window from the fast screen to the slow one sometimes causes a noticeable stutter, like the compositor is having a panic attack trying to decide which V-Sync signal to listen to. It settles down after a second, but it’s jarring.

There was also that whole drama with the theme overrides. The move to GTK4 meant a lot of the classic themes broke. The team warned us this was coming, but seeing my carefully curated dark mode turn into a blinding white “Adwaita” default after an update was… a wake-up call. I had to learn CSS again just to fix my panel padding.

Here is the snippet I had to drop into ~/.config/gtk-4.0/gtk.css to fix the oversized title bars that plagued the summer release. If you’re still annoyed by how “fat” the header bars look in the newer GNOME apps running on Mint, drop this in:

/* Shrink those massive GTK4 header bars */
headerbar {
    min-height: 32px;
    padding: 0px;
    margin: 0px;
}

headerbar entry,
headerbar button {
    min-height: 24px;
    margin-top: 2px;
    margin-bottom: 2px;
}

/* Fix the rounded corners clashing with Cinnamon borders */
window.csd, window.solid-csd {
    border-radius: 0;
    box-shadow: none;
}

Looking at 2026

So, here we are. The year is done. The transition that started in earnest with the May news cycle has settled into a stable, if slightly imperfect, reality.

I think the team made the right call focusing on stability over features this year. While other distros were chasing AI integration and whatever the latest hype cycle was, Mint just focused on making sure the window manager didn’t crash when you plugged in a projector.

Is it exciting? No. Is it boring? Absolutely. And honestly, at 11:30 PM on New Year’s Eve, boring is exactly what I want my operating system to be.