Here's Everything New Coming to Linux Mint 27 This Christmas

Linux Mint is an Ubuntu-based distribution equipped with its own desktop environment and a set of XApp tools that make it a truly unique package that caters to both beginners and power users alike.

For years it followed a familiar rhythm of new releases roughly every six months, with girls' names being used in alphabetical order from Ada in 2006 to Zena in 22.3 for naming individual releases.

That flow has since shifted as the developers settle on a longer development cycle, which sees them move to one major release per year with no point releases in between.

Version numbering and naming also change with this, as the number now points to the year ahead, taking users from 27 to 28 to 29, and boys' names take over from the girls' names.

Linux Mint 27 "Adrien" is the first release under this new strategy. It is planned for Christmas, builds on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and comes with a five-year support period.

So, with this feature rundown, we are following the monthly news posts since January and are sticking to changes that are new in Linux Mint 27.

🚧

Everything below is a preview of the anticipated changes. These can still shift before the stable release.

1. Wayland is Here

Cinnamon's Wayland session is no longer experimental. Both X11 and Wayland are fully supported in the next Cinnamon release, with Wayland nearly level with X11. This makes the flagship experience of Linux Mint Wayland-ready, bringing it up to the level of other mainstream distros like Fedora and Ubuntu.

Much of the groundwork revolves around everyday interactions. Windows and menus map properly, focus stealing is prevented, and crashes across Cinnamon, Muffin, cinnamon-session, and Xwayland are fixed.

Multi-monitor setups and KVM switches are covered too. 🔥

Graphics get attention as well. Hardware acceleration is supported, including GBM over EGL for NVIDIA cards, while HiDPI scaling reaches cursors and Chromium-based apps such as Slack and VS Code.

The final gap in ensuring Wayland support was the screensaver.

The new one is rendered by the compositor and handled by Cinnamon itself in place of a separate cinnamon-screensaver process, and it works on both Wayland and X11. The old screensaver stays as a fallback for one release before it goes away.

2. Desktop Upgrades

Nemo Changes

The default file manager, Nemo, gets a preview pane that can be opened with F7 or from the status bar. It handles audio files, pictures, and videos and can show metadata details such as the capture date and the camera used.

Similarly, Interactive Search, the feature that kicks in when you open a folder and start typing, becomes a filtered view that narrows the list as you type, in place of jumping to the first match and leaving you to navigate through the rest.

Screenshot Tool

A dedicated screenshot tool arrives for Cinnamon. It can capture a window with or without its shadow, and it can capture all monitors or just one.

You can also crop a shot before copying or saving it, and the tool deals with shadows differently for windows that draw their own titlebars and windows that rely on the system's.

Library Redesign

The Library is how the XApp app Thingy appears on the desktop, and it gets a redesign that groups recent documents by type instead of by the application that opened them.

A sidebar holds predefined groups that you can show, hide, and reorder. You can also add custom groups based on file type and limit them to a single directory if you like. Single items can be removed, and the whole recent documents list can be cleared at once.

3. System and Installer Changes

A Common Installer

Linux Mint switches to the live installer that Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) already uses, replacing Ubiquity. The new installer handles OEM installs, BIOS and EFI systems, Secure Boot, and LVM and LUKS setups.

Hibernation Returns

After Ubuntu dropped it, hibernation has made a comeback in Linux Mint 27 through a new "Sleep Modes" page in the System Administration tool that makes it easy to set up again.

Though it still needs a large swap to work. ⚙️

That page also adds two more options. Hybrid Sleep suspends the machine while also writing the session to disk, and Suspend-then-Hibernate starts out as a normal suspend before it hibernates once the battery reaches a critical level.

Kernel Management

This has moved out of the Update Manager and into the System Administration tool on both Mint and LMDE, and it is built around kernel series.

You track a series, choose how many older kernels to keep, and let a weekly cleanup remove the rest, or run a manual cleanup whenever you like, while a History page keeps a record of what happened.

Custom, OEM, and Real-Time are some of the kernel series' that can be marked as tracked, while untracked series are removed at the next cleanup round unless their kernels are exempted.

User Settings

Account settings also move into the System Administration tool, with it taking over the handling of users and their account details. That includes home directory encryption at account creation, webcam selfies with a mirror option, and HiDPI avatars.

4. Core App Additions

Superlight

Superlight is the new system monitor. Its graphs track CPU load, memory and swap use, GPU, network traffic, disk activity, temperatures, and fan speed, while a dedicated "Battery" page shows status and charge history.

An app page and a process list sit alongside them. Columns are configurable and sortable, and the choices are carried across sessions. The "Storage" page shows a usage breakdown and gives quick access to options like emptying the trash, clearing the cache, and accessing the file system.

Velocitty

The new default terminal for Linux Mint, called Velocitty, offers a tab overview in the style of Ghostty and Ptyxis, color palettes, and tabs that can be reordered, moved, and detached.

Paths can be shortened, and tab colors can flag root sessions, remote sessions, and running processes. Custom tabs can also be assigned a name, color, or command.

Xepub

If you prefer reading EPUB books, then you will love this one. Linux Mint 27 offers a dedicated app called Xepub that supports chapter navigation, search, bookmarks, and zoom.

You also get a choice of fonts, and it remembers where you stopped reading.

Selecting a word opens a menu that can be used to search the dictionary, Wikipedia, or a translator, and the search engine to be used is configurable.

Calendar and Clocks

Calendar is a new app from the Clockenstein project, and it connects to local calendars, Google Calendar, and CalDAV servers like Nextcloud. You can use it to create and edit events, and any sync errors on remote calendars are shown, with unreachable ones turning read-only.

Reminders can be dismissed or snoozed, and a separate daemon and notification agent deliver them while the app is not running, with the Cinnamon clock applet being compatible with those to keep events visible in the panel.

Clocks is the part that was still under development when we last heard about it. The September update previews it as an Android-inspired alarm app from the same project, with recurring alarms and custom sounds.

Unfold

Handling archives gets simpler with Unfold, a very portable archive manager that lets you view, create, and extract archives while using 7zip and 7zip-RAR to do the actual work behind the scenes.

Encrypted and password-protected archives are supported as well, and the app is released under GPLv3+.

5. Misc Changes

Before we wrap up, here are a few smaller changes that could be of interest to you:

• WPA3 and OWE support in Cinnamon.
• Fingerprint login in Slick Greeter without needing to press Enter.
• A new "Sensors" page in System Reports with fan speeds and temperatures that refresh automatically.
• A Mint-Y refresh with better dark colors and contrast, plus rounded frames, scrolled areas, treeviews, and listviews.

Can't Wait to Get Started?

Well, you will have to wait, oops. Linux Mint 27 is supposed to drop sometime around December 24 on Christmas Eve and will be offered in three officially supported variants:

• Cinnamon (the flagship ⭐)
• MATE
• Xfce

Seeing that this article has gone live before the release is available, the download portal linked above only features the earlier releases of Linux Mint. Though, if you have the skills, you could build the release from source.

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Asahi Linux Drops MIT and Goes Full GPL After AI Tools Were Used to Steal Unreleased Code

Asahi Linux is the reason you can run Linux on an Apple Silicon Mac today. For years, the project put most of its own code under the MIT license so that anyone, including the BSDs, could reuse it as needed.

That is changing because Asahi Linux is tired of code laundering. They have announced that Asahi is moving all of its repositories to the GNU General Public License version 2 or later. Going forward, all Asahi Linux code will be under strong copyleft licenses only.

This is because people were taking in-development code straight out of their personal forks, publishing it without credit, or rewriting it with AI to hide its origin for "replacing the project and aggressively monetising Linux on Apple Silicon."

What is code laundering?

Code laundering (also called license laundering) is the practice of taking someone else's code and passing it through a process that hides where it came from, so you can use it without honoring the original license or crediting the author.

Before AI, this usually meant manually rewriting code line by line, renaming variables and stuff, and shuffling functions around until it no longer looked like the original.

LLMs made it much more easy and cheaper of course.

📋

The MIT license only asks you to keep the original copyright notice. It doesn't require you to share your changes or keep your version open. That's what makes it popular, and it's also what made things problematic for Asahi here.

Learning from history

The move has come after the Asahi team was made aware "some time ago" of multiple attempts to exploit its permissive licensing to hijack its work.

In the most extreme cases, feature code that was still under development was lifted from developers' personal forks before it was even publicly released. The report points out that the MIT license "explicitly allows this, and has no carveouts to protect against bad faith actors."

Asahi didn't name anyone in the report. It also didn't spell out how existing contributions will be relicensed or whether every past contributor agreed to it.

Asahi draws parallels with WINE's situation two decades ago. WINE, the compatibility layer that lets you run Windows apps on Linux, was originally MIT-licensed too. But in the late 90s and early 2000s, companies took the code, built proprietary forks on top of it, and sold them commercially. So, in 2002, the WINE team relicensed to the LGPL to discourage proprietary forks and push companies to contribute upstream.

Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it

Asahi has been upset lately

Asahi didn't name anyone so we are left with guesswork on who they are targeting with this license move.

There have been at least two public forks of Asahi's work in recent months, both tied to AI-assisted development. In case you did not know, Asahi Linux forbids AI generated code contribution.

The first is Aurora Silicon and its Vulkan driver, Borealis. Borealis is a fork of Asahi's HoneyKrisp, the Vulkan driver for Apple GPUs. Aurora Silicon submitted a pull request to register its own Vulkan driver ID with Khronos (VK_DRIVER_ID_AURORA_BOREALIS), says the driver runs on M1 to M5 and the A18 Pro, and keeps it in its own Mesa fork rather than upstream.

The second is Gravity Linux, a Fedora-based distro for Apple Silicon. It was forked from Asahi over the disagreement about LLM use.

To be fair to Gravity, it is open source, it isn't selling anything, and it credits its AI use openly. It even says it plans to sunset the distro once its driver work lands upstream.

It isn't the kind of bad actor the progress report describes. But it does represent the "permissive fork that embraces AI" approach that Asahi has consistently pushed back against.

📋

For clarification, Asahi's progress report does not mention Aurora Silicon or Gravity Linux by name. I have provided their conflict with Asahi as context.

Why this license change matters

As far as I can tell, this is the first time a major open source project has moved to copyleft specifically because of AI-assisted code laundering. Projects have relicensed before, but usually to stop cloud providers from reselling their work as a service. This one is specifically about AI.

I wouldn't be surprised if more hardware enablement and reverse-engineering projects follow. Making the first changes takes a lot of time and effort but they are easier to "rewrite" once someone has done the hard part.

Will the GPL actually help?

If the problem is people who already ignore the MIT license, why would they respect the GPL? After all, GPL cannot stop a determined bad actor. Nothing does, actually.

Stripping attribution from MIT code already breaks the MIT license, since keeping the copyright notice is its one real condition.

What the GPL changes is the commercial benefit. Under MIT, someone can take Asahi's code, close it up, and sell a product, and that's perfectly legal as long as the notice stays in.

Under the GPL, anyone who distributes a modified version has to release the source under the same license. You can't legally build a closed, paid Apple Silicon distro on top of GPL code. And if a product's source has to be public, the copying is easier to spot.

Not everyone is happy

The move has drawn criticism, particularly from the BSD side, which was one of the main reasons Asahi chose MIT in the first place. OpenBSD's Apple Silicon support relies on Asahi's m1n1 bootloader.

OpenBSD developer Bryan Steele wrote on X:

"Sad to see Asahi out there burning bridges for no reason.. relicensing m1n1 and drivers under GPL2-or-later, seemingly without the consent of all prior contributors, under the guise of "defending against AI bad actors", seems entirely disingenuous and misguided."

Sad to see Asahi out there burning bridges for no reason.. relicensing m1n1 and drivers under GPL2-or-later, seemingly without the consent of all prior contributors, under the guise of "defending against AI bad actors", seems entirely disingenuous and misguided.

— Bryan Steele 🦋 (@canadianbryan) November 7, 2026

Wrapping up

Asahi is betting that copyleft license provides a better defense in this changed world where anyone can launder code with a prompt.

It may not stop the bad actors from rewriting its code, but at least it reduces the chances of a closed commercial fork.

It would be interesting to see whether the BSD community finds a way to keep working with Asahi under the new terms.

Suggested Read 📖 These Linux Distros Can Run on Apple Silicon Mac

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Hate Chromium? Well, There’s a Linux Desktop Based on it Now

Say the name "Chromium" out loud in Linux circles, and you will soon see what a mob looks like. Many people don't like how much of the web rests on one engine led by Google, and they prefer to keep it away from their systems.

Now we have Domicile, a new Rust-based Wayland compositor that uses a patched build of Chromium to draw the entire desktop as a web page.

Apps still run natively, and each Wayland window goes straight into Chromium's rendering system and shows up inside that page as an element. A window and a website can then sit side by side and be arranged the same way.

Domicile: Overview ⭐

Some Domicile mockups as shown on the homepage.

Domicile is not a drop-in desktop like GNOME or KDE Plasma. It leaves the bar, the window layout, and the look to a shell, and that shell itself is a web page you have to write yourself.

Native app windows and websites both sit on that page, and because CSS decides where each one goes, layouts like tiling or floating take only a few lines of styling.

You can even swap the shell without closing a single window because loading a new one resets only the state held in the shell's own page. A single page can span every monitor, and shells are built from packages that anyone can publish on npm, whether it is a whole desktop, a bar, or a launcher.

The compositor still handles the lock screen, tray icons, notifications, and screen sharing, while the shell decides how they look. The built-in browser runs Manifest V3 Chrome extensions, but some of them behave differently than they do in Chrome.

Apps need Wayland support to run. Electron, SDL, and Qt apps start in Wayland mode, but X11-only ones will not run. Xwayland, the compatibility layer that lets X11 apps work on Wayland desktops, is something Domicile does not include.

The project is provided under the MIT license, and the Chromium files it modifies stick to Chromium's licenses. One more thing, and this could be a dealbreaker for some of you, the project is AI-assisted.

Manganese, the element?

0:00

/0:04

Not quite. Manganese is the ready-made shell that comes with Domicile, and it works as a complete tiling desktop out of the box. Its keybindings follow Sway's on the Super key, and you get ten workspaces along with tabs, stacks, splits, floating windows, and a scratchpad.

Websites open as windows too, sitting next to native apps in the same layout, while extensions from the Chrome Web Store show up as buttons in the top bar.

It comes with a Settings app, clipboard history, launcher, screenshots tool, notifications, and a lock screen. Since every part of it is its own package, you can add a new item to the bar or replace the launcher while the rest stays as it is.

Getting started

Packages exist for Fedora, openSUSE, Debian, Ubuntu, and Arch Linux, plus an AUR package for Arch users. For NixOS, or Nix on any distro, you can use the project's flake.

Domicile

📋

It runs only on x86_64, and the project has no ARM builds.

A monolithic package carries Manganese, the login session, the domicile command, and the React packages that shells build against. After installing, you point a config file at the shell you want, then log out and pick "Domicile" on the login screen.

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Kitty 0.50 Picks Up Where You Left Off After a System Restart

kitty is a GPLv3-licensed, GPU-based terminal emulator for Linux and macOS that uses OpenGL for rendering and is written in C, Python, and Go.

It can organize work into tabs and windows across seven layouts, supports small terminal programs called kittens that can be used to extend it, and can be controlled from the shell.

v0.50, its newest release, can bring back your open windows after a logout on Linux and macOS.

Kitty 0.50

kitty now saves every OS window, tab, and window with its scrollback when a session ends and restores them at the next launch. You turn it on in kitty.conf with the restore_session_after_logout setting.

On Linux, this needs a desktop portal with v3 of the inhibit interface, and while Linux stores the state unencrypted and readable only by you, a macOS system would encrypt it with a dedicated key in the keychain.

Docked windows are new too, and they let you pin a window to the edge of another window or a tab. They sit outside the layout and are meant for things like a status bar or a file tree. A window dock goes wherever its window goes, and a tab dock stays until the last regular window in that tab closes.

There are also the three new cursor trail shaders called cursor-trail-railgun, cursor-trail-torpedo, and cursor-trail-pixiedust. When in use, these emit particles off the moving cursor, giving you a Neovide-like trail. They need cursor trails turned on, and shaders can also be triggered with key presses now.

Wayland users can now use a touchscreen to click with a tap, scroll with a swipe, and select text by holding a finger in place before dragging to select the rest of it. Window decorations on GNOME and similar compositors also look native and use the desktop's titlebar font and button layout (as shown above).

The release also fixes a flaw that let a malicious request bypass remote control password authentication, along with several memory safety bugs.

Some tests

I ran kitty 0.50 on Ubuntu 26.10 with GNOME 51 on Wayland, all running inside a virtual machine.

First, I tried docked windows by adding two key bindings to my config using Nano:

map f1 launch --type=tab-dock --dock-edge=bottom --dock-size=1 --dock-skip-focus watch -n1 date
map f2 launch --type=window-dock --dock-edge=left --dock-size=25% top

I pressed F1 first. A one-row strip showed up at the bottom of the window and stayed there. I had pointed it at watch -n1 date, but all I got was a shell prompt.

F2 was next. It opened a top panel on the left edge, and the shell made room for it. I kept pressing it, and each press added another panel beside the first, three in total.

Opening a new tab using Ctrl+Shift+T gave me a clean slate, with the earlier view going to the background.

Next, I tested one of the three new cursor trail shaders. I added cursor_trail 1 and custom_shaders cursor-trail-pixiedust to my config and restarted kitty. Whenever the cursor jumped across the window, it left a trail of small white specks behind it.

Installation

You can use the following cURL command to get kitty:

curl -L https://sw.kovidgoyal.net/kitty/installer.sh | sh /dev/stdin

It is also available in the repositories of most major Linux distros, but these tend to run behind when it comes to new releases. Here's a list to give you a quick start:

• Ubuntu: sudo apt install kitty
• Fedora: sudo dnf install kitty
• Arch Linux: sudo pacman -S kitty

Building from source is also a possible installation path if you prefer that.

Before you click away, know that you can customize kitty to your liking by tweaking its various settings or installing kittens.

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Passbolt is an Open Source Password Manager Built Specially For Teams

Sharing a login with a teammate often means pasting it into a chat, dropping it in a spreadsheet, or pinning a note somewhere everyone can see.

That works until a password changes, someone leaves the team, or your credentials get leaked thanks to an employee's hasty story post on social media.

Passbolt is built for exactly that problem. You might remember it from our Linux password managers list, where it was listed as the go-to for businesses and teams.

💡

If you were looking for solutions that are tailored for individuals, then Proton Pass (partner link) and AliasVault are good picks to consider.

No password woes?

Passbolt is the creation of Passbolt SA, a company based in Luxembourg. It lets teams store and share logins and other secrets, making them accessible from one place, reducing the chances of team members being served expired or exposed credentials.

Underneath, it uses OpenPGP for encryption, and you log in with two things, a private key and a passphrase. Every person with access to a secret gets their own separately encrypted copy of it.

To use it in a browser, you will need to install its extension, which takes care of the security-sensitive operations and auto-fills logins on websites.

But there's something you need to know.

The Community Edition is open source, available on GitHub under the AGPL-3.0 license, and so are the browser extension, the mobile apps, and the Docker and Helm setups.

Then there are the paid plans. Pro and Enterprise are the self-hosted ones, and Cloud Business, Cloud Sovereign, and Cloud Enterprise are hosted by Passbolt. They add things like SSO, account recovery, and activity logs on top of what the Community Edition offers.

Passbolt says the Pro and Enterprise editions use the AGPL license too. Its GitHub organization lists no separate repositories for them. Pro also needs a subscription key to run, and you lose updates and support once the subscription ends.

Trying the Passbolt Cloud

I signed up for the Cloud Business trial by filling out a form with my full name, email address, organization name, and the workspace URL I wanted all my content stored under.

Passbolt also asks you to give consent to it storing and processing this personal information in line with its privacy policy.

Once submitted, I was notified that an email with instructions was on its way.

I followed the link in it, after which a configuration page took over, running through a few steps before it let me get in without setting a password. Passbolt then nudged me to install its browser extension.

The browser extension

Seeing that I was on Vivaldi, it automatically showed me a download button to get the Chromium version of the extension installed. Before adding it, I went through the permissions it asked for.

It requests a broad set, covering reading and changing all my data on all websites, modifying the data I copy and paste, and managing my downloads.

After reviewing the permissions the extension required and accepting them, I was taken into the passphrase and security token configuration phase, where I had to pick a passphrase, followed by a security token made up of a color and three characters.

Managing entries

Now that I was logged in, I started adding new entries. They are created from the blue "Create" button at the top-left, and the types are diverse, including Passwords, TOTPs, Custom Fields, Pin Codes, and Notes. I started populating Passbolt with some social media-related logins.

The new entry form for passwords offers a lot of customizability. I could set the name, URI, username, and password, along with a color and an icon for the entry.

The generator is very useful too, letting me set the length, pick the character types to include, and even switch to passphrases for more flexibility when creating new accounts.

When I saved an entry, Passbolt asked for my passphrase, with the security token I had picked sitting right next to the field. It can also remember the passphrase for a while, with choices running from 5 minutes to staying remembered until I log out.

Sharing, exporting, and deleting can be done in batches as well. You just select the entries and pick an option from the toolbar above the list, and when you delete, Passbolt cautions that the entry is removed permanently and cannot be recovered.

Autofilling passwords

Next, I checked out the autofill feature through the browser extension. When I went to log in to Threads, it said no passwords were found for the current page and did not suggest the saved credential. I had to search for it manually, and only then did it fill in the login form once I clicked "Use on this page."

That came down to the entry's URI, which I had saved as threads.net while the login page sat on threads.com.

I could also add new entries from the extension and browse through the filters, groups, and tags from my account.

Collaborating with others

I then tried my hand at the highlight of the tool, collaborating with other team members.

For this, I went into the "Manage Users & Groups" menu accessible via the gear button on top-right and invited a colleague for collaboration (shown as P).

He received an invitation email, and once he was set up, I gave him access to a specific folder I had created (Passbolt Collaboration Test), filled with credentials I had imported.

To do that, I used the "Share" option found by right-clicking on the folder, where I typed his name into the field, giving him the read permission.

P could access the folder without much fuss, and with the permission he had, he could not edit any entries but could copy the username, password, URI, and permalink for an entry.

From the same Users & Groups menu from earlier, I could also promote him from User to Admin, giving him control over the workspace's users and settings, or suspend his account when needed.

Interested?

To try Passbolt Cloud, you sign up with your name, email, organization name, and a workspace URL. The 7-day trial starts automatically without Passbolt pestering you for your credit card info.

Sign Up Now!

After that, paid options include Cloud Business, which costs $5.4 per user per month on a monthly plan, or $4.9 if you go yearly. Cloud Sovereign is $8 per user per month billed annually, and both need at least 10 users.

You can also get a custom quote tailored to your setup via Cloud Enterprise.

If you would rather host it yourself, the Community Edition is free with no cap on users, and you can install it on Debian, Ubuntu, Docker, Kubernetes, Red Hat, AlmaLinux, and more.

Pro adds extras like SSO and LDAP provisioning, and it costs $4.9 per user per month billed annually for a minimum of 10 users.

Browser extensions are also available for Chromium browsers like Chrome, Brave, Edge, and Vivaldi, as well as Firefox and Safari. There are apps for iOS and Android too, and the only desktop app is for Windows ☹️.

As an alternative, Linux users can make use of the CLI tool Passbolt offers.

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