Yesterday Clem announced the availability of Cinnamon 2.4. The new release will be featured in Linux Mint 17.1 “Rebecca”, the upcoming release of the user-friendly operating system planned for the end of November and in LMDE 2 “Betsy” planned for Spring 2015.
We already wrote about some stuffs what’s new in Cinnamon 2.4 in a previous article, but here’s a more comprehensive list of the new features from the Linux Mint website:
Responsiveness and memory usage
- CJS was rebased on a newer version of GJS in an effort to reduce memory usage and provide faster execution times.
- All Cinnamon components were reviewed and their source code was checked with static analysis tools. Although most of them were small, about 30 memory leaks were fixed.
- Icons used in Cinnamon Settings were added to the Mint-X icon theme. This increased responsiveness (This is specific to Linux Mint so we encourage all artists and distributions to do the same).
More polish
- Credit to and similar to GNOME Shell, the Cinnamon desktop now starts with a zoom animation.
- The login sound is now handled directly by Cinnamon (as opposed to cinnamon-settings-daemon) and plays in sync with the login sequence.
- Modules in Cinnamon Settings and categories in the application menu are now sorted alphabetically.
- Similar to Windows, “Super+e” now opens up the home directory.
- Cinnamon 2.4 ships with many small refinements (multiple panel launchers, improvements in the sound applet, removal of the timeout in the logout dialog…etc) and a lot of bug fixes.
More settings and hardware support
- Single-button touchpads are now supported (like the one used on the Macbook) and actions for 2-finger and 3-finger clicks are configurable. By default they correspond to right-click and middle-click.
- Compositing in full-screen mode is now configurable and does not require to restart Cinnamon. This means less screen-tearing by default for most users and the option to undirect windows for gamers and users requiring an application to run at full speed without being impacted by the composition manager.
- The desktop font is now configurable.
- It is now possible to give the screensaver a custom date format, but also to change the font and the color of the text.
Apart from these the Theme Settings and Background Settings were completely redesigned and the latter now supports background slideshows. Nemo also got many improvements, some of them I wrote about in an earlier post.
Installation
If you’re running Linux Mint, I’d suggest you to wait until Linux Mint 17.1 is released. You will be able to easily upgrade to it from Linux Mint 17. However if you can’t wait, or if you’re using another (Ubuntu, or Ubuntu based) distribution you’re able to install or update Cinnamon.
To install / update, first add a new repository by typing this in Terminal:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gwendal-lebihan-dev/cinnamon-nightly |
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To install it run the following command:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install cinnamon |
If you have already installed and want update Cinnamon, run this:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade |
- Check out the announcement at Linux Mint Segfault website.
