Monthly News – January 2026 February 11, 2026 by Clem·75 Comments

[Condobloke]

Monthly News – January 2026 – The Linux Mint Blog

blog.linuxmint.com

Amongst other news:
I’d like to apologize to our forum users for how slow and unreliable the forums were last month. The volume of traffic we receive is extremely high, and it’s mostly coming from AIs, bots, scripts, and web crawlers. It got to the point where our server couldn’t cope and people weren’t able to use the forums.
In addition to the Sucuri WAF, it took us a while to come up with an efficient way to filter bad traffic. If you’re getting 403 errors from the forums right now, please make sure your browser is up to date.
We upgraded the server to give it 10× the CPU capacity and twice the bandwidth.
------------------------------------------
The Cinnamon screensaver only works in X11. It’s a standalone application which runs in its own process and uses the GTK toolkit. X11 is responsible for making sure it sits on top of Cinnamon’s window manager and hides the windows when the screen is locked.
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)

----------------------------------------------

Longer Development Cycle

I'll leave you to access and read this news from the article itself

Obviously there has been significant thought put into this by Clem and Co.

I think it is about time....long overdue, in fact

 

[KGIII]

We upgraded the server to give it 10× the CPU capacity and twice the bandwidth.

I am not privy to their server details, but that sounds off for some reason.

The following is entirely speculation:

The types of problems they were having seem like they'd do better by adding more RAM. Also, the '10x' for CPU really makes me curious. Did they go from a VPS with 1 core to a 10 core VPS?

Then, there's 'twice the bandwidth'. They weren't running out of bandwidth, or it'd have been a completely different error. Do they mean 'throughput'? Some VPS providers offer a tiered selection for maximum throughput, so you can increase that.

Think of 'bandwidth' as a jug of water. If they were out of water, the VPS company would charge them more automatically -- or just throw up an error message saying that they were out of resources for the month.

What they likely needed was a faster way to get the water out of the jug. They don't need a bigger jug, they just need to be able to make it faster to empty the jug.

Further, why aren't they using caching via their CDN? Sure, a WAF is a piece of the puzzle, but so isn't a CDN with proper caching. That way, the bots and scrapers are hitting the cached content. People just visiting would get cached data. The cached content will only change when changes are made to the site. That's picked up and cached almost instantly. Somewhere close to 90% of their traffic (given the averages) could be served from a cache.

Finally, back to the CPU bit. The problems they describe sound more like they'd be better off increasing RAM. They're using a forum. That does eat up CPU cycles, but much of what is done is done in RAM. The software isn't doing a bunch of computations; it's presenting work that has already been done. It's effectively just managing some text and a few images.

While this is all speculation, it's not speculation without experience. I have managed servers in my life. Indeed, I still do manage some servers -- both in my home and on the public-facing internet. I have even managed 'big iron', though it was better to hire a professional to do so, as my time was better spent elsewhere.

So, I know a tiny bit. It is still speculative in nature, which is something I should stress.