After six months of development, the release of the new version was announced of the popular desktop environment developed by Linux Mint, «Cinnamon 4.6«, Within which the Linux Mint distribution community develops it as a fork of the GNOME Shell, the Nautilus file manager, and the Mutter window manager, with the goal of providing the GNOME 2-style environment with support for successful GNOME Shell interaction elements.
Cinnamon is based on GNOME components, but these components are shipped as a periodically synchronized fork that is not externally related to GNOME. A new release of Cinnamon will be offered on the Linux Mint 20 distribution, launching in June.
What's new in Cinnamon 4.6?
In this new version of the environment, the implemented support for fractional scaling is highlighted, which allows you to choose the optimal size of elements on displays with high pixel density (HiDPI), for example, you can increase the interface elements that are displayed not 2 times, but 1.5 times.
Monitor settings dialog was redesigned, added ability to select screen refresh rate and the support to assign its own scale factors for each monitor, which solves the problem with the operation when connecting a normal monitor and HiDPI.
A new palette has been proposed in the Mint-Y design theme, in which, due to manipulations with hue and saturation, brighter colors are selected, but without loss of readability and comfort. New Pink and Aqua color sets.
The XappStatusIcon applet added sSupport API StatusNotifier (Qt and Electron applications), libAppIndicator (Ubuntu LEDs) and libAyatana (Ayatana LEDs for Unity), which will use XappStatusIcon as a unique systray minimizing mechanism that does not require support for various desktop-side APIs.
The change will improve the support for placing indicators, applications based on the Electron platform and the xembed protocol in the systray (GTK technology for placing icons on the systray). XAppStatusIcon represents the representation of the icon, tooltip, and label on the side of the applet, and uses DBus to transfer information through applets as well as click events. The rendering on the side of the applet provides high-quality icons of any size and solves display problems.
In addition, the performance of optimized code to process thumbnails in the Nemo file manager. Thumbnails now are generated asynchronously and thumbnails are loaded with lower priority than directory browsing (the idea is that content processing is given priority, and the thumbnails are loaded according to the residual principle, which can significantly speed up the work at the cost of a longer display of the stub icons ).
A new utility has been prepared to exchange files between two computers on the local network, using encryption for data transfer.
How to install Cinnamon 4.6 on Linux?
For those who are interested in being able to install this new version of the desktop environment, You can do it for now by downloading the source code of this and compiling from your system.
If they are Ubuntu or derivative users the packages have not been updated in the official repository and they must wait, usually it takes a few days.
This repo can be added from a terminal by typing:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:embrosyn/cinnamon sudo apt-get update
And they will be able to install with:
sudo apt install cinnamon
In the case of Arch Linux the package is not found yet within the repositories, but in AUR it is a matter of hours for it to be available, you can monitor the state in this link.
To install the package as soon as it is available, just type:
yay -S cinnamon
While for Fedora, the package is currently only available for version 33 (trial version) but in the same way it does not take long to be available for previous versions.
To install the package as soon as it is available, just type:
sudo dnf install cinnamon
I love Mint. You can imagine how I feel after being dumped by Mint. The last distribution that I can load on my PC without causing conflicts is Linux Mint Silvia 18.3. Why? Because the nvidia native driver was included in the repositories. The previous distributions did not bring it but one could add those repositories from a terminal three lines of code. I tried installing LMDE 4 Debbie and it doesn't allow installing PPAs. Without the nvidia-current driver, my screen fills with diagonal stripes and my PC hangs. I have raised it in various forums and nobody understands well what is happening to me. By telling them that the most coherent answer I found was: "you have to upgrade or die." Also not that my machine is low on resources. As I said, Mint 18.3 works perfectly. But one day it will no longer have support. That's why I say Mint abandoned me. Despite that, it is very likely that you will try to install Cinnamon 4.6. But if the author of this note or someone can assure me that I will be able to install the nvidia-current driver, I will do so without the fear that it will be a waste of time and a new spite.
and now in Mint 20 the Nvidia drivers are back ...