Monthly News – October 2026

Key points

Linux Mint's October 2026 monthly report previews new features planned for the next release: configurable sleep modes including hibernation, a preview pane in Nemo, and three new applications (a system monitor, a terminal and an archive manager). It also covers a Zenity fork in the current repositories, a rebuilt Community Website and September's donation figures.

Status

• Everything described is a preview of work in progress, aimed at the next Linux Mint version. No version number or release date is given.

Sleep modes

• The System Administration tool gets a new Sleep Modes page that lets users enable Hibernation and configure it correctly.
• Hibernation writes the session to disk and powers the machine off completely, so the battery is not drained. The session is restored on resume.
• Hibernation does not work out of the box, needs a large swap space and can take longer than a reboot. Ubuntu removed it from the available sleep modes, so Mint users usually did not have it.
• Hybrid Sleep is added. It suspends the machine and also saves the session to disk, so the session survives if the battery runs out.
• Suspend-then-Hibernate is added. It suspends first and switches to hibernation when the battery reaches a critical level.
• The motivation is that plain Suspend still uses power. A laptop left suspended for two or three days can run flat and lose the session.

Nemo

• The file manager gains a preview pane, toggled with F7 or a button in the status bar.
• It previews audio, images and video.
• It also shows media metadata, such as when a photo was taken and with which camera.

Superlight (new system monitor)

• Graphs cover CPU, RAM, swap, GPU, network, disk I/O, temperature and fan speed.
• An App page shows resource use per running application. A similar view covers every process.
• Columns can be chosen, sorted and reordered, and Superlight remembers the layout.
• On machines with a battery, it shows battery status and details, plus a history of charge level and power in/out.
• A Storage page breaks down disk usage. Users can drill into files and folders, and see space used by Steam games and by Flatpak.

Velocitty (new terminal)

• It has a tab overview and themes based on colour palettes.
• Tabs can be reordered, moved between windows or detached into a new window.
• The shell and a startup command are configurable, for example fish running fastfetch.
• Paths can be shortened in tab names and the prompt. For example, /var/lib/dpkg/info can appear as info in the tab and …/lib/dpkg/info in the prompt.
• Tab colour signals activity: red for superuser sessions (root, sudo, pkexec), blue for remote sessions (ssh, sftp) and a lighter shade while a process is running.
• Custom tabs can have a name, colour and command, and can be set to open at launch. A bookmark icon lists all custom tabs.

Unfold (new archive manager)

• It is a minimal tool for viewing, creating and extracting archives.
• It is built on 7zip and 7zip-RAR and supports their encryption formats, including password-protected archives.

Other news

• Xenity is a fork of Zenity 3.44 (GTK3) with the same features, appearance and syntax. It is already in the Mint 22.x and LMDE 7 repositories.
• All Cinnamon spices that relied on Zenity have been moved to Xenity.
• The Community Website has been rewritten from scratch after critical PHP vulnerabilities were found. It no longer uses PHP and no longer stores passwords.
• Sign-in now goes through GitHub. The site receives your GitHub username, email address and avatar.
• If that email matches an existing Community Website account, the old account is merged into the new one.

Funding

• In September, 443 donors gave a total of $13,824.
• The project has 2,434 Patreon patrons contributing $5,258 per month.

Summary by DistroNews, based on the original post.