After 6 months of development, the release of the Cinnamon 6.0 user environment has been finalized. This environment is a fork of the GNOME Shell, Nautilus file manager, and Mutter window manager that is being developed by the Linux Mint community, aiming to provide a classic GNOME 2-style environment while retaining successful interaction elements from GNOME Shell. Cinnamon is based on GNOME components, but these components are delivered as a periodically synchronized fork, independent of any external dependencies on GNOME. The version number change to 6.0 is not associated with any particularly significant changes; it simply continues the tradition of using even decimal numbers for stable release numbering (5.6, 5.8, 6.0, etc.). The new Cinnamon release will be offered in the upcoming Linux Mint 21.3 distribution, slated for release in December.
Key innovations:
- Experimental support for operation in a Wayland-based environment has been added. The porting is in its initial stages, so many features available when running Cinnamon in an X.org environment are currently absent or do not function correctly in a Wayland session. However, window management and virtual desktops are already operational in the Wayland environment, and most applications and components, including the file manager and panel, can be launched. Completion of Cinnamon's functionality in the Wayland environment is planned before the release of Linux Mint 23, which is expected to be released in 2026.
- The capabilities of the IPTV player Hypnotix have been expanded, now featuring a shared favorites list for channels that operates independently of providers (allowing users to keep all their favorite channels in one place, even when using connections to multiple broadcast providers). An integrated feature has been added to download and install new versions of the yt-dlp application, which is used for watching Youtube (distributions typically include older versions of yt-dlp, causing issues when changes occur on Youtube that affect compatibility).
- Support for using AVIF format images as desktop wallpapers has been introduced.
- Dithering has been employed for more effective color blending when forming the background gradient (lightbox) by simulating shades through a mixture of existing colors.
- The ability to resize the menu editor window has been added.
- The sound control applet has been updated with an option to always display the microphone mute indicator, regardless of the microphone activation (useful when you need to mute the microphone in advance before starting a program that uses it). Middle mouse button handling has been implemented while holding down the Shift key.
- A setting has been added to select the screen on which notifications will appear.
- A screen gesture for zooming the desktop has been introduced.
- An option has been added to the context menu to show detailed application information.
- The screenshot creation service now includes the ability to determine the color of a selected point on the screen.
- Gesture recognition processing has been disabled when the screensaver is active (this change can be seen as a security improvement, as gestures could potentially be used to execute commands despite the screen being locked).
Source: opennet.ru
