Linux Mint is getting an improved Cinnamon menu and new troubleshooting tools

It's a new month, and the Linux Mint team has released its report on work done for last month (October) on many different components of the distro, including the Cinnamon DE.

The team worked on the Cinnamon menu applet, adding an option that'll let you reposition the search bar to the bottom of the menu. They also added a setting to move the system buttons, like the ones for shutdown and settings, over to the sidebar instead of having them locked at the bottom.

Troubleshooting is also getting improved with some big changes to the old "System Reports" tool. The developers are renaming it to "System Information" to better reflect its expanded capabilities. It now has 4 new pages, namely USB, GPU, PCI, and BIOS.

The USB page gives a detailed view of connected devices, grouping them by controller so you can check connection speeds and power usage against the controller's maximums.

The GPU page shows information on your graphics card and its hardware acceleration support, while the PCI page lists internal components with their PCI IDs and the drivers they use. Finally, the BIOS page provides specifics on your motherboard, BIOS version, and whether you are using secure boot.

The Linux Mint team also announced that Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) 6 will reach its End of Life next year, on January 1st, 2026. After that date, the release will no longer get security or bug-fix updates. For users on the 64-bit version, an upgrade path to LMDE 7 is available.

Unfortunately, there's no upgrade path for those on the 32-bit version, as upstream projects like Debian and Mozilla have dropped support for that architecture. LMDE 6 shipped almost three years ago in late 2023, bringing features like the Linux Kernel 6.1 and Pipewire as the default sound server from its Debian 12 base.

Other changes in the latest report include a new utility called "System Administration". This tool is focused on, well, tasks that require elevated privileges. Its first feature is a "Boot menu" page where you can toggle the visibility of the GRUB menu, set its timeout, or add kernel boot parameters for hardware debugging.

The team also started a project named XSI (XApp Symbolic Icons) to fix a problem where the Adwaita icon theme stopped supporting applications outside of GNOME, which caused missing icons in Cinnamon.

All the core Mint projects have made the switch to XSI.

Source

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Posted Friday 7 November 2025 at 1:07 pm AEST (my time).

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