For once, the Linux Mint Monthly News brought some interesting news in its October 2026 edition.

But only two pieces of news are worthwhile: the addition of “Hibernation” to Sleep Modes, and the Nemo Preview Pane (F7). Everything else is a waste of time, a duplication of existing apps, or both!

Superlight—yet another system monitor. It’s a pandemic.

Velocitty—because “borrowing” terminals from other DEs is bad, OK. So, no more Gnome Terminal, but no Ghostty or Ptyxis, either. And Velocitty “can be themed with palettes”, because Clem has an obsession with colors. It also has plenty of unnecessary customizations. I’m so happy that Xfce Terminal is just that: a terminal.

Unfold—really? One more “small archive manager”? Why on the fucking Earth, why?

Oh, and—because they had plenty of time and resources that the rest of the planet doesn’t—they couldn’t just patch PHP. Nope, they “decided to rewrite [the Community Website] from scratch”! “It no longer uses PHP and it no longer stores or uses passwords.”

Not a bad thing per se, but there are still no dates for Alpha or Beta releases of Linux Mint 27! I’m pretty sure the Christmas release (should it really happen) will be an apocalypse of bugs!

Everything is still… not for the public!

As always, please note that the features presented below are a preview. They’re still being worked on and are planned for the next version of Linux Mint.

Now, some selected comments.

● Clem, on the choice of terminals:

The initial plan was to review existing terminals and to see if switching away from gnome-terminal made sense. During this review, we were impressed with two terminals in particular: Ghostty and Ptyxis. We decided to drop gnome-terminal, to adopt Ptyxis and to patch it with improvements. At that stage we had a libAdwaita terminal. It integrated well, in my opinion, because of the nature of the app.

However…

There were a few problems with Ptyxis:

– It didn’t have an active development team
– We were starting to have too many patches on it, so even though it was still Ptyxis, we couldn’t really continue to call it like that
– We didn’t know who was going to take over development of Ptyxis and if these patches would ever be accepted upstream
– We still had really good ideas we wanted to implement (some of our own and some coming from Ghostty) so we were going to deviate even more

“We” (it’s not the royal “we”, but I don’t know who else makes the important decisions regarding Mint, so I take it’s Clem) always want PATCHES! They fucking can’t NOT modify everything! I don’t mean to say that Ptyxis was a good decision for GNOME, but boy, nothing is good enough for Clem (except for the bugs of his making).

● Clem, answering to “I forgot to ask, do we have any dates for when the beta gets released?”

I can’t give you any dates yet but we’re tagging and freezing projects right now. Most Cinnamon subprojects were tagged already.

Clem has always been brutally inconsiderate regarding Mint’s user community. They might be old farts or people who are using Linux Mint without understanding much of what they’re doing, but this is open-source, and the spirit of OSS is to release Alpha, Beta, and RC ISOs of a distro! Even weekly or daily builds if possible! (Clem couldn’t be bothered to update the LMDE7 ISO, released on October 14, 2025. He’s an ass.)

● Tobias, pointing out an issue that deserves more attention than much of the new crapola:

Preview panes is a nice feature but I’d really like thumbnails to be stored. Scrolling through my music folder or pictures folder, caching the cover arts and thumbnails every new session is something I haven’t seen since Windows 98 (!!!). So maybe it’d be nice if Nemo would remember things instead of always giving me high disk I/O because I dare to scroll a bit faster through my files…

● Clem, answering to “So with MATE declining in support, could we see a KDE Plasma Edition of Mint in the future?”

I don’t like speaking about things until they’re ready. I can’t tell you if it will happen and I can’t tell you if it will happen in time for Mint 27 but we are considering new editions. Just be aware though, if we do KDE or GNOME editions, they will be vanilla.

OH, MY GOD! Will we have a plethora of new Linux Mint desktops in 7 weeks? “If we do”—because there is no way “they” would disclose such a secret!

Hey, Palantir (and hey, Alexa), is Clem going to adopt KDE for Linux Mint 27? Or, God forbid, vanilla GNOME?

● To end this post, a typical idiot:

Absolutely Loveeee everything new we are gonna get with mint 27, it really was a good decision to increase the development time because wow look at all these. Soo much love to our mint team ❤️❤️❤️❤️. cant wait to get my hands on mint 27

To such a public, such a distro with gazillions of new features and apps, but still vaporware less than 8 weeks before its planned release. Hey, but it has colors! It will still be ugly as hell, but with colors in the terminal!