Cinnamon 5.6 has already been released and comes with great improvements

After 6 months of development the release of the new version was announced from the popular desktop environment Cinnamon 5.6, within which the developer community of the Linux Mint distribution is developing a fork of GNOME Shell, the Nautilus file manager, and the Mutter window manager.

This new version of Cinnamon 5.6 comes with a number of quite interesting improvements that improve the user workflow and the overall user experience of the desktop environment.

Main new features of Cinnamon 5.6

In this new version that is presented, we can find that reworked code to remove apps from main menu: If the current user's rights are sufficient to delete them, the administrator password is no longer required. For example, without entering a password, the user can now delete Flatpak programs or local application shortcuts.

Another change that stands out in this new version of Cinnamon 5.6 is that the corner bar subprogram is proposed, which is located on the right side of the panel and replaced the show-desktop applet, in its place there is now a separator between the menu button and the task list.

Clement Lefebvre explains that:

“This is a feature that was implemented in Windows. While the corner bar is less noticeable/detectable than the show-desktop applet, it's easier to use when you know it's there. It occupies the corner of the screen so you can get there quickly without aiming and with a quick movement of the mouse.”

The new applet allows binding different actions to different mouse button presses, such as displaying the contents of a windowless desktop, displaying desktops, or calling interfaces to switch between windows and virtual desktops. The location in the corner of the screen makes it easy to position the mouse pointer in the applet. The applet also allows you to quickly place files on the desktop, no matter how many windows are open, simply by dragging and dropping the necessary files onto the applet area.

Another new feature in Cinnamon 5.6 is the implementation in the control panel that allows configuring the display time of notifications. In fact, the user will be able to choose between keeping the notification on the screen for several seconds or making it disappear shortly after it is displayed.

In Cinnamon 5.6 also came the new keyboard shortcuts to automatically move a window or application on the monitor up, or Super+Shift+Up Arrow, or down, Super+Shift+Down Arrow, within multi-monitor setups.

By default, the “Start”, “Computer”, “Trash” and “Network” icons are hidden on the desktop (you can retrieve them through the settings). The “Start” icon has been replaced by a button on the panel and a favorites section in the main menu, while the “Computer”, “Trash” and “Network” icons are rarely used and can be quickly accessed through of the file manager. Mounted drives and files located in the ~/Desktop directory are displayed on the desktop as before.

In the file manager Nemo in file list view mode with icons displayed, now only the name is highlighted for the selected files and the icon remains as is.

Of the other changes that stand out in this new version:

• Icons representing the desktop are now rotated vertically.
• Synaptic and the update manager have been moved to use pkexec to remember the entered password, which, when performing multiple operations, makes it possible to request the password only once.
• Added the ability to fix the position of the desks.
• In the context menu that is displayed when right-clicking on the desktop, an item for going to display settings has been added.

Finally, it is worth mentioning that this new version of Cinnamon 5.6 will be arriving in the next version of Linux Mint 21.1, which is expected to arrive at the end of December.

As for those who are interested in being able to test the environment, they should know that Cinnamon 5.6.1 can already be tested with Arch Linux, Fedora, Mageia Cauldron, as well as Manjaro Testing and Unstable.

If you are interested in learning more about it, you can consult the details at the following link.