Link: https://itsfoss.com/news/linux-mint-27-announced/

I feel dejected they didn't go with Aaron or Abdul.

In the project's September monthly update, Linux Mint lead, Clement Lefebvre (clem), says that the distro's version number now reflects the upcoming year and that point releases aren't a thing anymore.

Releases will come once a year, so 28 follows this one, and users upgrade from the current year's to the next. This ought to make it simpler for the many beginners who use Linux Mint as a gateway to the Linux platform.

The codenames change too, as the girls' names Mint has used since 2006 give way to boys' names. Linux Mint 27 "Adrien" is the first release to follow these new conventions, though it did not start off that way.

Where did LM 23 go?

You see, the devs had no name or version number ready for the next release when work on it began earlier this year, so they picked temporary ones. This way, "Alfa" became the codename and "23" the version.

That was because the release strategy was unclear. The cycle length, the handling of minor releases, and the question of alpha releases were all undecided, and the strategy would also dictate how releases got numbered and named.

It all goes back to the January update, when Clem said shipping a new release twice a year while also looking after LMDE was leaving them with less time to actually build features.

By March, the team had locked in a longer development cycle and a Christmas 2026 target for the next release. The move we have been talking about so far marks the end of that long decision-making process.

Clem also points out that using the girls' names for releases all these years, from Ada to Zena, had made them run out of alphabet just as the schedule changed, which he found a funny coincidence.

He says the project has never spent a full year on one release before, and while the move away from six-month cycles was a tough decision, it is working out.

A year of development

The longer cycle gives the team room to attempt projects that would once have felt out of reach. The Clockenstein project, which gave Mint a calendar app in the August update, now has an alarm app called Clocks too.

Alerts from Clocks run through the Clockenstein daemon and agent that already handle the calendar's notifications, so they go off even with the app shut. It handles repeating alarms and lets you pick your own sounds, while its look and behavior are borrowed from Android.

Three more projects, Superlight, Unfold, and Velocitty, are also getting their finishing touches. The next update blog will feature them.

If you need a refresher of the development work carried out so far, then you can read about Linux Mint's kernel removal feature and how Wayland support has been achieved.

I remember when more frequent "little-bang" releases took the place of fewer "big-bang" releases; and why.

I hope their rediscovery of the reasoning behind little-bang goes gently.

I have no such background knowledge. What's the reasoning?

I guess I am not understanding why every distro now needs its own DE and accompanying software. What was wrong with letting people choose between Mate and Cinnamon? If you have the bandwidth then more power to you I guess but it sounds like they don’t.

I'm guessing they're saying that small/fewer breakages are less painful than big/numerous breakages.

Fuck I just installed it last week.
I'm a Linux noob, is this a painless update or is there more to it?

hopefully they will soon bring a gui for managing drivers in lmde and managing systemd. the gui for managing systemd can be useful for people who are new to linux.

Systemd does about 60 different things now. Which ones did you want a GUI for?

the init.

In the case of Mint, Cinnamon and MATE, the answer is spite.

So a good long while ago, Canonical came down with "not made here" syndrome. They were moving away from being Debian Gnome On Rails and they were going to do their own thing. They did their own init system called Upstart, their own display server called Mir, their own DE called Unity, and their own package manager called Snap.

Linux Mint was created basically as a fork of Ubuntu, they kept the Gnome desktop, init.d, X11, APT etc. while retaining some of the Ubuntu codebase. Mint was and I'm pretty sure still is compatible with PPAs, if you remember those.

Around that same time, Gnome pulled a Gnome and announced Gnome 3 and their "MacOS with fetal alcohol syndrome" style guide. A lot of folks balked at it, which is why Gnome has been forked so many times:

• MATE is a continuation of Gnome 2. If you liked Gnome 2 the way it was, go with MATE.

• Unity was Canonical's "we want Gnome to look like this" thing. Which they eventually abandoned and last I heard some kid is maintaining it for fun.

• Cinnamon is Clem's idea of What Gnome 3 Should Be. For awhile they tried applying extensions to Gnome 3 but it ended up basically needing to be a separate codebase.

• More recently Cosmic, System76's thing, which I genuinely don't know why they did that.

So from the Mint team's perspective, Mint is defuckulated Ubuntu, and Cinnamon is defuckulated Gnome.

Mint has carved out two niches for itself: It's a solid, full-featured operating system for installing on older, slower hardware that runs on Windows as well as my dishwasher runs on concrete, and as a beginner friendly Linux distros for newcomers or "grandma who just emails."

It does get a bit excessive though; I've learned to largely ignore the Trendy Distro Of The Month about the last time I heard anyone mention EndeavorOS or maybe Peppermint. It's...mostly hype for hype's sake.

That type of update is painless.
In normal Update Manager look at the edit button:
Edit → Upgrade to Linux Mint 22.3 Zena

https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=4980

But if you installed last week you should already be on latest. (jan 2026 release date)

The next available update is skipping numbers to 27 and coming out Christmas 2026.

AFAIK System76 had issues with the Gnome devs not wanting to accept some pull requests from S76 which they wanted for their own functionality, so they eventually decided to build their own DE in their preferred language; rust.

Cosmic is now the only major DE that is entirely rejecting AI generated code, so I'm rooting for it to succeed.

I mean there are reasons for going big too. I trust them to know what's most appropriate and when.

i hate year version numbering personally.

Thanks, that's good news

Maybe this is useful:

https://github.com/plrigaux/sysd-manager

aren't drivers mostly built into the kernel except for stuff like nvidia proprietary stuff?

i doubt people new to linux would even bother with managing system daemons..

That's nothing new, GNOME devs have always had a stick up their assess. Over a decade ago, they dropped Split View from Nautilus because of personal issues with the dev (they even put it on a board, double underlined it, took a picture and post it online).

And people still ask why everyone hates GNOME 🤦‍♂️

which is why by my count there are at least 4 grievance forks of Gnome and I have a vague sense I'm missing one.

ZorinOS? Which uses a very heavily themed and extended Gnome DE?

I'm unaware of any for KDE. There doesn't need to be; KDE doesn't have the same preemptive butthurtedness that Gnome has.

Well Gnome came into existence because someone didn't like KDE's license choices at that time

There's Trinity DE, which is a fork of Plasma 3.5.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trinity_Desktop_Environment

There's a fork of KDE 3.5 called Trinity that's still maintained.

I've been in and around Linux for going on 14 years now and this is the first I'm hearing of it. I'm guessing it's real popular in some nation or region that doesn't matter like Scandanavia or Arkansas?

Thank you for the history lesson - always interesting to see how things fit together