Episode 479 Show Notes
Welcome to mintCast
the Podcast by the Linux Mint Community for All Users of Linux
This is Episode 479!
Recorded on Sunday, February 15, 2026.
Mostly stable I’m Joe; Hey everyone, I’m Bill; being clever and pithy I’m Majid; not uploading my I.D., I’m Jim
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- First up in the news: Mint Monthly News – January 2026,
- In security and privacy: Theres an SSH Stalker
- And finally, the feedback and a couple of suggestions
- Please remember if you want to follow along with our discussions, the full show notes for this episode are linked in the show’s description.
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The News
20 minutes
- Mint Monthly News – January 2026
- From the Mint blog by Clem (edited by londoner)
- Donations: Mint received donations from more than a thousand people in December! This number of donors in a single month is unprecedented. A total of $47,312 was raised thanks to the generous contributions of 1,393 donors: In addition, Linux Mint is proudly supported by 2,017 patrons, for a sum of $4,900 per month. Clem sends his thanks to all of you!
- Keyboard Layouts and Input Methods: Work continues on improving input methods. The team is working on making it possible to set a specific keyboard layout when configuring an input method.
- Forums: Clem apologised for the recent problems experienced when trying to access the forums. A high volume of traffic is received, mostly coming from AIs, bots, scripts, and web crawlers. It got to the point where the server couldn’t cope and people weren’t able to use the forums. Mitigation methods have been installed and the server upgraded to give it 10× the CPU capacity and twice the bandwidth.
- Users and Account Details: In the next release, the Administration Tool (mintsysadm) will handle user administration and account details in editions where the desktop tools can be hidden. User management in mintsysadm focuses on the most common tasks. Once a user is set up, that user can set up a password and finalize the account without admin intervention. Home directory encryption, which until now was only supported during the OS installation, will be fully supported during the creation of new user accounts. Webcams will be fully supported when taking selfies (i.e. you can see yourself before taking the photo, and decide whether to mirror the webcam or not). Avatars will have full HiDPI support and look crisp on modern hardware.
- Cinnamon Screensaver and Wayland: The current Cinnamon screensaver only works in X11. One of the goals for the next Linux Mint release is to implement a new screensaver which will:
• Replace the existing one
• Work in both Wayland and X11
• Be natively rendered by Cinnamon’s window manager (compositor) Wayland support so far has been “experimental”. Once all the pieces are in place, Mint can support it and start testing it as a potential solution. The team know there are pros and cons to X11 and Wayland, and they want to support both. Supporting Wayland doesn’t mean they’ll start using it by default, but it makes it a possibility. As always, they’ll end up using what works best for most users. - Longer Development Cycle: With a release every six months plus LMDE, the team
- spends more time testing, fixing, and releasing than developing. They’re thinking about changing that and adopting a longer development cycle. As it happens, the next release will be based on a new LTS and they just ran out of codenames 🙂
- Stay tuned, there will be more information on this. Obviously the codenames strategy doesn’t matter much, but the team are very interested in adopting a longer development cycle.
- Discord Launches Teen-by-Default Settings Globally. Face scan or I.D. needed? – Jim
- Firefox Announces ‘A.I. Controls’ To Block Its Upcoming A.I. Features Bill
- AppManager offers drag-and-drop AppImage management. – Jim
- Sony Will Ship Its Final Blu-ray Recorders This Month – Jim
- The Memory Crisis Is Taking No Prisoners Joe
- RaspberyPi goes Dual RAM – Majid
- Linux 6.19 – Majid
- KDE 6.6 & Gnome 50 Betas out – Majid
- Ubuntu getting rid of the Software & Updater tool – Majid
- Libreoffice 26.2 released – Majid
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Security and Privacy
10 minutes
Vibrations from the Ether
20 minutes (~5 minutes each)
- From Londoner
- You guys really have have some memory problems.😁 Just two weeks ago in the shownotes for ep477, I mentioned that if you didn’t like the new menu in Mint 22.3, you can go back to the old one, just by installing the “Classic Menu” by fredcw at https://cinnamon-spices.linuxmint.com/applets/view/432
- This is not just 99%, but 100% the old menu- –
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Check This Out
10 minutes
- From Londoner (again)
- f you want Plasma on Mint, it’s easy to do. This is the latest video on YouTube which even describes how to remove Cinnamon,
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QewvRKVHIrI
Housekeeping & Announcements
- Thank you for listening to this episode of mintCast!
- If you see something that you think we should be talking about, tell us!
Send us email at [email protected]
Join us live on Youtube
Post at the mintCast subreddit
Chat with us on Discord and Telegram
Or post directly at https://mintcast.org
- Next Episode – 2 pm US Central time on Sunday, March 1, 2026.
- Get mintCast converted to your time zone
- Next Saturday we will host a Roundtable Live Stream. Please come and join us using the Discord voice channel at 2 pm US Central time on Saturday, February 21, 2026.
- Get the Roundtable Live Stream converted to your time zone
- Livestream information is at mintcast.org/livestream
Wrap-up
- Joe – Tllts.org, linuxlugcast.com, [email protected], Buy Joe a coffee
- Moss – Full Circle Weekly News, [email protected], Mastodon @[email protected], occasionally on HPR
- Bill – [email protected], Bill_H on Discord, @[email protected] on Mastodon, also checkout the other podcast I am on, Linux OTC (with Eric & Majid).
- Majid – [email protected] @[email protected], Atypical.doctor on Instagram and Threads and The Atypical Doctor Podcast and also Linux OTC and Distrohoppers Digest.
- Eric – I can be reached by email at [email protected].
- Charles – [email protected], Mr PDX on Discord
- Jim– [email protected], GNU2Linux on Discord, The Linux Shortcut on YouTube
Before we leave, we want to make sure to acknowledge some of the people who make mintCast possible:
- Bill for our audio editing and for hosting the server which runs our website, website maintenance, and the NextCloud server on which we host our show notes and raw audio
- Archive.org for hosting our audio files
- Hobstar for our logo, initrd for the animated Discord logo
- Londoner for our time syncs and various other contributions
- The Linux Mint development team for the fine distro we love to talk about <Thanks, Clem … and co!>
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