Monthly News – August 2026

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Hi everyone,

Many thanks for your support and for your donations.

We’ve got quite a bit of news this month.

As usual, the features and improvements presented in this blog post are a preview. They’re still being worked on and are planned for the next version of Linux Mint.

XApp

The XApp project started within Linux Mint but it has grown a lot since then. Its libraries, tools and applications are used in many desktops and distributions.

It was given a new website to make it easier to discover all its components: https://xapp-project.org

Library

Thingy, known as the “Library” in the desktop, was redesigned.

Until now, documents were grouped by application. For instance, PDF files and all the other document types supported by XReader were grouped together under “Document Viewer”.

The library now organizes documents by type instead. It no longer matters which applications are installed or which formats they support.

The sidebar comes with predefined groups for common types of documents. You can choose which groups are visible and change their order.

You can also create your own groups and decide which types of files they contain.

For instance, you could create a group for a particular project, limited to a work directory and grouping multiple document types.

The library also lets you remove individual items from the list or clear the entire list of recently opened documents at once.

Xepub

Xepub is a new EPUB reader.

It provides a reading experience similar to what you would find on a Kindle or a Kobo.

In the desktop it will appear as your “Book Reader”.

You can navigate between chapters, search the contents of the book, add bookmarks and quickly navigate between them.

When you reopen a book, Xepub remembers where you were, so you can simply continue reading.

If you select a word, a menu gives you quick access to search engines, so you can look it up in a dictionary, find it on Wikipedia or translate it.

The search engines are fully configurable in the preferences.

You can change their URLs or add anything you might find useful.

If you select a passage, it gets highlighted as an annotation. You can give it the color of your choice and add a note.

 

And of course, you can adjust the zoom level, choose your preferred fonts and customize the reading experience to your liking.

Clockenstein

It’s alive! 🙂

Say hello to your “Calendar”.

Clockenstein is a brand new calendar application and the latest addition to the XApp family.

It supports multiple calendars and works with local calendars, Google Calendar and CalDAV services such as Nextcloud.

You can create and edit events and choose which calendar they belong to.

Down in the laboratory, there’s a little more going on. 🙂

When we worked on Clockenstein, one of the things we really wanted was to always know what was going on with remote calendars. Are they connected? Are they synchronized? And if something goes wrong, why?

Clockenstein keeps track of the state of each remote calendar and reports connection and synchronization issues in the application. If a calendar can’t be reached, you can still see its events, but it becomes read-only until the connection is restored.

Clockenstein has its own daemon and its own notification agent. So it doesn’t matter whether the Calendar application is open or not.

The daemon keeps remote calendars synchronized and keeps an eye on upcoming events for calendars that have reminders enabled.

When a reminder is due, the notification agent presents it on the desktop. You can dismiss it or snooze it to be reminded again later.

Finally, Clockenstein provides interfaces for desktop environments to interact with it, and even to replace its notification agent. The Cinnamon clock applet is fully compatible with these interfaces, so just like in the past, you’ll see your calendar events directly from the panel.

 

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88 comments

  2. Thank you for your work! Love the e-reader and new calendar app! I’m glad Linux Mint is going forward. As always I will frivolously take the opportunity to ask a question. The one and only thing that worries me about incoming Wayland adoption in Mint is color management. The issue is often not taken seriously in the Linux world (for some weird reason). For me and every photographer, graphic designer, illustrator, video editor and similiar creative person using Mint in production – this is crucial thing though. As I understand Wayland, color management can’t be done global way (“distro agnostic”) as it was in X11 anymore – so it’s implementation becomes specific distro team’s responsibility. Also – as I understand, Cinnamonn uses GNOME’s Mutter as a composer handling ICC profiles right now, am I wrong? Recently I had a lot of trouble with it’s behaviour, conflicting profiles or weird resetting as described in this bug: https://github.com/linuxmint/cinnamon-control-center/issues/265. As somebody pointed out in the discussion, the Nvidia XServer Settings app seems to override the Mint’s Color settings when opened even once, so for now I just avoid opening it and removed it from default startup apps list. After reinstalling the whole system and applying the ICC – it seems to stay in place. However – this kind of behaviour is not reassuring. So my question is: in case of Wayland – will the GNOME’s solution be adopted “as is” also, or something different will be prepared?

    Reply

  3. big fan of the new calendar app!
    Unrelated but I remember you mentioned struggling with adding a driver manager for LMDE, have you checked the way MX linux does it to fetch nvidia drivers?

    Reply

    3. We did struggle and abandoned the idea. Not that it wasn’t feasible, but that it wasn’t worth maintaining in the long run. I’m all ears for pointers though, give us more detail on the MX solution.

    5. @Clem
      The latest MX Linux NVIDIA driver management tools—specifically the graphical NVIDIA Driver Installer (part of the MX Tools suite) and the CLI backend ddm-mx (Device Driver Manager)—are widely considered highly reliable and user-friendly for standard desktop setups. However, user feedback indicates they can still be a bit “hit-or-miss” on complex laptop hardware like older hybrid graphics systems.

    6. If you are using a 50 series card please type Nvidia data center in Google, click the link and choose either Debian or Ubuntu. They have the latest 615 driver. Choose network and put one command at a time in the terminal. I am on Debian testing and using 5090 rtx with 615 driver and works like a charm.

    7. PikaOS also does some interesting driver manager work on top of a Debian (albeit Sid) base. Haven’t used it myself, but the distro gets praise.

  4. Thanks to Clem and the rest of the team for all the time and attention to the XApps and all the other things to create a cohesive and functional desktop. Ten plus year user of Linux Mint here.

    Reply

  5. Lately, I’ve seen lots of comments online from people lamenting the fact that Mint doesn’t have a KDE Plasma variant any more. Plasma 6.x is now so good that it is hard to ignore. I would love to be able to still use Mint in all its splendour with the added bonus of KDE desktop. I hope it could be an option in the future.

    Reply

    1. But then it wouldn’t be mint without cinnamon. A DE really makes all the difference. It just be another generic LTS distro at this point.

    2. Since there are two other DEs besides Cinnamon and I use MATE anyway, your point makes no sense to me.

    3. I get that. But from my understanding. Mate and even Xfce is there for systems not having much computing resources. Cinnamon can be on the heavy side for such systems. It is their flagship DE though. I’m sure they have their reasons for not having KDE.

    4. they used to have KDE but working with qt took time so they decided to drop it to only work with gtk

    5. +1

      @Mario J,
      One thing is the desktop environment, another thing is the underlaying OS.
      I really really like the way Mint has been polishing Ubuntu and I indeed love the Forums for help, but sometimes I also would like to have KDE Plasma on top of Mint.
      I’m a Cinnamon user since its birth and it makes me feel home, but there are some fugly GTK theming mismatches that sometimes takes me to desperation and every once in a while I consider trying Plasma again, but I want it to be on top of Mint, and I’d also like to have the greatest and latest 6.7.5 Plasma desktop, not the old 5:146ubuntu3 from the repos as Mint 22.3 is now “old stable” software and it seems it cannot have Plasma 6.

      Also, I do not dare to reinstall my system from scratch, I don’t think it’s even possible to configure the Cinnamon Panel the way I still have it (windows old style) (last time I couldn’t!) because this system has been installed and upgraded since the EOL of LMDE2. I can’t work with the current default Cinnamon Panel, it doesn’t make ergonomical sense to me, and if I ever have to reinstall my system and I can’t make the Panel work the way I want, KDE Plasma will have to be it.

    6. Hi.You could use KDE DE installing kubuntu-desktop archives. This will install KDE from Kubuntu project. This works for me as a experiment some years before. But Cinamon has a better user experience.

    7. @Bruno Miranda,

      I get what you’re saying regarding Gnome Libadwaita apps doing odd things with theming. That said, those apps will still look odd and out of place using KDE, and actually moreso, since Cinnamon has the added ability to add your GTK widgets and colors onto libadwaita windows. And since the Mint team is continually working on the problem, I’m sure it will get better. I don’t know that you can say the same things about KDE. And if you like QT apps, those will still work with Cinnamon and can be themed to your GTK themes very easily.

      I’ve personally never been a KDE fan. It’s a bit much for my tastes. But I do get the appeal for some. But really, Cinnamon is Mint’s primary environment, much better (in my opinion) than KDE, and they won’t be messing around with KDE/QT anytime soon. I can pretty much guarantee it.

    9. For Bruno Miranda

      For the classic panel
      open applets
      take out the “grouped window list”
      add the “window list”

  6. Thank you for this amazing update, I like the new calendar app and the fact that it’s back on GTK3!
    The screenshots look great, but I wish the numbers in the small calendar preview on the top left were centered.
    One question: what are your thoughts on moving from Thunderbird ESR to Thunderbird Release, like the Firefox package?

    Reply

  7. Bonjour Clem,

    Petite remarque en passant :

    Sous Debian testing avec Cinnamon 6.6.9-2, si on fait un clic bouton de drte sur le Menu Démarrer > Configurer > et qu’on enlève la coche dans “Barre latérale”, on perd les boutons : Verrouiller, Log-out, Eteindre la machine.

    J’espère que vous pouvez corriger ça…

    Bon développement à vous.

    Reply

    1. PS

      J’ajouterai qu’une fonction de mise à jour automatique des applets, actions, thèmes, desklets, extensions serait le bien venu, il est en effet quelque peu fastidieux de devoir contrôler ça manuellement… et en cas de bug critique on serait ainsi à l’abri, car en l’état actuel, on n’est prévenu de rien.

      Meilleures salutations.

    3. Bonjour,

      C’est prévu. Il y a une option pour poser ces boutons soit dans la barre latérale soit près de la barre de recherche. Ces deux options permettent en outre, comme vous l’avez observé, de cacher/supprimer les boutons. Certains utilisateurs ont ces boutons ailleurs dans le bureau et ne souhaitent pas les voir dans le menu.

  8. Is the new calendar app a fork of something else or is it built from scratch? Either way, it was the right move, IMO, great job.

    Reply

    1. Both apps are written and designed entirely from scratch. They’re using python and GTK3. In terms of UI and features, Xepub is inspired by Kobo and Kindle, and Clockenstein by Fantastical.

    1. And dark mode of course!

      I’ve severely strained my eyes a week ago and just going through this bright comment page even with my screen being almost 1 meter away from me, my eye muscles feel tired. Dark mode is an absolute must.

  11. Thank you for all your hard work, its very nice to see such thoughtful ongoing development work. Especially as its so user focused. Once again this is sort of thing that makes MINT even more useful and helps it stand out from crowd as it were.

    Reply

  12. All the three apps mentioned make a lot of sense for me, thank you. I will be more than happy if Xepub has customizable text background and font colours as white and black version or sepia on sepia tire eyes a lot. Looking forward to Mint 23 with impatience.

    Reply

    1. I can see that currently Xepub has a choice of light (black on white), sepia (on sepia) or dark (white on black) theme.

    2. Oh, I didn’t know it. Perhaps the final version will allow free choice of colours or add some extra presets with good contrast. Black on not-too-dark sepia at least. Sepia on sepia and black-white are not good choices if one wants to read for any longer time. That’s why I don’t use Xreader. Let’s wait and see, there is still some time before the app goes public.

  13. That’s a very nice refresh for the xapps. Well done. Perhaps mintstick should join them? I know I’ve missed having USB Image Writer & USB Stick Formatter elsewhere, & glad to find them in my Kali ARM’s default install.

    Reply

  14. Have any decisions been made regarding Rust coreutils, Rust sudo, etc? Given that LMDE is moving towards feature parity with main Mint, perhaps staying on the non-Rust Debian versions makes sense and the projects can be merged/transitioned to just Debian base at some point.

    Reply

    1. Yes. It was decided to stick with the base when it comes to that. So although this introduces a difference between LMDE and Ubuntu, it’s yet another base-specific difference. Mint sticks with Ubuntu on this one for maintenance and compatibility reasons.

    2. @Clem Understandable, though not my preferred decision with stability and compatibility with older less maintained packages in mind. Thankfully, 26.04 still officially supports coreutils-from-gnu and sudo.ws, so I might just stay on there for now.

  15. For the sake of transparency, could it be clarified whether Clockenstein is forked off Gnome Calendar ? It seems very similar. Same for Xepub ?

    Reply

    1. Both apps are written from scratch in Python and GTK3, with very simple designs, limited configuration and precise goals when it comes to features. They’re meant to be as easy to maintain as possible going forward. In Mint 23, Clockenstein will replace GNOME Calendar, GNOME Online Accounts and Evolution Data Server. Xepub won’t replace any app but it allows us to remove really badly written code and EPUB support from Xreader.

    2. Clem, you say that “In Mint 23, Clockenstein will replace GNOME Calendar, GNOME Online Accounts and Evolution Data Server. ” Can we assume GNOME Online Accounts will still be available? I use it to connect to Google Drive in Nemo.

    3. Hi Tony,

      Yes of course. It will be available in the repositories. That said note that GOA no longer supports Google Drive.

    4. Hi Clem

      You say that Clockenstein will replace Evolution Data Server. I use Evolution as my email client and the Software manager states “The data server, called “Evolution Data Server” is responsible for managing mail, calendar, addressbook, tasks and memo information.” Can i assume that Evolution will carry on as normal and that I will still have access to the evolution calendar and address books etc?

      Many thanks

    6. Clem, it seems an odd choice to have Clockenstein replace Online Accounts. They are not really equivalent apps

    7. Hi Mike,

      Let me rephrase that. It doesn’t replace its functionality for people who need it, it replaces gnome-calendar/eds/goa-gtk in the default selection of pre-installed pkgs in the ISO.

      For people who still want to use EDS-compatible tools (Evolution, gnome-calendar etc.), or connect to remote services supported by GOA, they’ll still have the ability to install GOA/EDS and all from the repositories. Out of the box though, we’ll just ship with clockenstein.

      The two big reasons we used to ship GOA-GTK in the ISO were to connect gnome-calendar to google-calendar and nemo to google-drive. Now that gnome-calendar is gone and OA no longer supports google-drive, we no longer need it installed by default.

    8. OA no longer supports Google Drive?! Yikes! That’s a bad change for sure! I really on that all the time

  17. Clockenstein looks awesome!

    But I’m actually disappointed with xepub. One of the neat features of xreader was a single program for all documents (with markdown the only one missing). Now it’s two programs to handle documents? And looks like any othe generic epub reader? Does it at least keep the option to view the epub chapter as a single scrollable page or will it force on us the “turning pages” view?

    Reply

  18. Since these changes are great especially with the new apps. I would like to know if the HWE iso will be coming to LMDE? I am not a fan of Ubuntu so i appreciate LMDE getting the latest updates. Thank you

    Reply

  19. Cool, and I hope Clockenstein can get support for different timezones. The same goes for the Cinnamon Date and Time applet. It would simply be useful to see what time others would have when you plan events on your timezone, so you can adjust the time to make it as reasonable as possible for everyone.

    Reply

    1. Hi Nick,

      Clockenstein-calendar translates everything into your timezone, i.e. if you connect it to a remote calendar which has events from a different timezone, you’ll see them in your local time if that makes sense. The ability to see world clocks is something we’ll add in clockenstein-clocks, not in the upcoming release, but the one after that.

  20. Thank you for your ongoing efforts; I’m sure these apps will be very useful. I’d like to ask a few questions:
    Have you considered supporting MOBI files for Xepub (perhaps using KindleUnpack, as Lector, Bookworm, or Foliate do)?. Would it be possible for the Cinnamon menu to have the ability to search for and open files from the Home folder (as Cinnamenu does)? . Will Onboard be replaced by Virtual Keyboard (perhaps by adding a windowed mode), or will you opt for another Wayland-compatible fork? (reference> https://github.com/onboard-osk/onboard/issues/41 ).

    Reply

  21. I love Xed, I installed it to every other DEs and distros (when I was still distro hopping). And now Xepub, which I hope it’ll load epub files smooth and fast. I can’t wait until it lists on Software Manager.

    Reply

  22. Great news about the new apps!

    I have another question:
    In Nemo you can give folders a color, which is a very useful feature to quickly find folders that are used more often. At least, that’s how I use it, but I’m sure people have invented many more use cases.

    However, in any application, if you open or save a file, the file/folder picker doesn’t show these folder colors. Are there any plans to support this in the future? Or is it technically impossible?

    Reply

  23. Hi Mint team,

    I’m really happy to see the latest updates! I greatly admire your work — Linux Mint is paving the way for the future!

    I was thinking of a few suggestions for programs I use heavily in my daily routine that could become XApps for the system:

    -> KolourPaint (I really like this program)
    -> Galculator
    -> Geany
    -> kid3
    -> ksnip
    -> NormCap
    -> Heimer

    Reply

    1. A progress tracker/to-do list, or a calculator with a unit conversion feature would be very useful (something simple like Gauge).

  25. Sorry Clem, but it’s not clear to me what is special or different about these XApp apps, except that we have to build them ourselves. Will they ever be added to the repo? Could they at least be provided as .deb files?

    One instruction over at xapp-project.org makes no sense:
    sudo apt build-dep –mark-auto .

    No! That returns:
    E: Unsupported file . given on commandline
    E: You must specify at least one package to check the builddeps for

    What is the correct command?

    I successfully built xepub. It doesn’t appear in the menu (reboot needed?), but starts from the command line. On the other hand, clockenstein just didn’t work for me. The command-line response to “clockenstein” is “command not found”. Entering the apparent app name clockenstein-calendar returns an error that there is no module named clockenstein! But I just built it. What am I missing?

    I am a long time user of Linux Mint.

    Reply

    1. Make sure you’re in the right folder. You can install the dependencies yourself otherwise and just build with dpkg-buildpackage. They’re in the repo for Mint 27, though keep in mind that’s still alpha right now.

    1. @Harry,
      In my VM of alfa/adrien, xapps like pix, xed, xviewer are not installed but all show up in Software Manager.
      I feel sure they will be part of the ISO default install when the beta test version comes out in December.

    2. BTW – Does anybody know if the memory leak in Xviewer is finally fixed? When will it be shipped? December?

    3. In my case, I just had to install a dependency {pix-data:amd64=3.4.10+alpha} before attempting to install Pix; similarly, Xed requires a dependency {xed-common:amd64=3.8.9+alpha}.

  28. FYI, your blog RSS feed seems to have some (intermittent?) problems. Feedly service has been showing your feed as “Unreachable” for some time now. Also in InoReader, the “fetch log” for your feed shows many failed attempts to fetch the feed items per day (some successful attempts too, but many failed). The feed used to work fine for a long time but in recent months it has been like this. Please investigate and fix, people following your feed in Feedly (currently 350 users according to Feedly) are not receiving new blog posts. Many thanks!

    Reply

    1. I’m not familiar with Spotlight, but global search already exists. You can either use an external program, such as Albert, or you can install Cinnamenu, which expands the standard menu search, which normally just searches installed applications, to include all Home folder files, web history, web bookmarks, search suggestions from your favorite search engines, or even search for emoji’s to paste into text inputs. Whichever one you prefer, it’s just a matter of simply installing it.

  30. I have a small question. Do we have HDR and VRR? I am just asking this because my monitor is capable of high refresh. Thank you

    Reply

  31. Hi Clem
    I’d like to use clockenstein-clocks. However there does not appear to be a way to permanently change the notification sound – it defaults to /usr/share/clockenstein/sounds/notification.oga
    Could an option be added to allow setting a different sound as default?

    Reply

  32. All of you in the Linux mint team are doing great work. I see posts in the subreddit daily about people switching to mint and mostly are ecstatic about the user experience. xepub and clockenstein both look promising and seem like they could offer people some good quality of life improvements. Please consider adding more info about the built in troubleshooting and configuration tools for new installations. And some sort of built in wizard, maybe or maybe not A.I., that you could tell it want you want and offer options, might be nice to have sometime in the future. I personally still have hesitations about using A.I. but there’s certainly an appeal to being able to describe what you want to do and it spits out an answer telling you how to do it. These kinds of ideas could really help new users overcome the trepidation of doing something new and outside their comfort zone. I have always been thoroughly impressed with how accessible the Linux mint team is, even having Clem replying to comments here. I often tell people that is one of the biggest things that makes this different from corporations like Apple, Microsoft and even Canonical. Thanks for doing all you do. It’s changed my life for the better.

    Reply

  33. Récemment sous LMDE 7 j’ai reçu un message d’erreur avec Chromium sur le site ARTE.tv:
    “Votre navigateur ne possède pas toutes les options requises pour afficher nos vidéos”
    Après avoir opéré quelques changements conseillés par l’IA DeepSeek , toujours la même erreur mais seulement au bout d’une minute environ.
    J’ai plus tard pensé à passer sur Wayland et là miracle plus de problème. Du coup je reste sous Wayland.

    Reply

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