After five months of development user environment release , within which the community of developers of the Linux Mint distribution is developing a fork of the GNOME Shell, the Nautilus file manager and the Mutter window manager, aimed at providing a classic GNOME 2-style environment with support for successful interaction elements from the GNOME Shell. Cinnamon is based on the GNOME components, but these components are shipped as a periodically synchronized fork with no external dependencies to GNOME.
The new release of Cinnamon will be offered in the Linux Mint 19.3 distribution, which is scheduled to be released before the Christmas holidays. In the near future, packages will be prepared that can be installed on Linux Mint and Ubuntu from without waiting for a new version of Linux Mint.
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- Work has been done to improve performance on high pixel density (HiDPI) screens. In the language and repository settings, icons with flags have been replaced, which looked blurry due to scaling on HiDPI screens. Improved image quality when previewing themes;
- The XAppStatus applet and the XApp.StatusIcon API are proposed, implementing an alternative mechanism for placing icons with application indicators in the system tray. XApp.StatusIcon solves problems encountered with Gtk.StatusIcon, which was designed to use 16-pixel icons, has problems with HiDPI, and is tied to legacy technologies such as Gtk.Plug and Gtk.Socket, which are not compatible with GTK4 and Wayland. Gtk.StatusIcon also means that rendering is done on the application side, not the applet side. To solve these problems, the AppIndicator system was proposed in Ubuntu, but it does not support all the functionality of Gtk.StatusIcon and, as a rule, requires reworking the applets.
XApp.StatusIcon, like AppIndicator, takes the rendering of the icon, tooltip and label to the applet side, and uses DBus to pass information through applets. Applet-side rendering provides high-quality icons of any size and solves display problems. The transmission of click events from the applet to the application is supported, which is also carried out via the DBus bus. For compatibility with other desktops, a stub App.StatusIcon has been prepared, which detects the presence of an applet and, if necessary, rolls back to Gtk.StatusIcon, which makes it possible to display icons of old applications based on Gtk.StatusIcon;
- The layout of elements in modal dialogs has been improved, settings have been added to control the layout of elements in windows and change focus when opening new windows;
- The panel's context menu has been simplified and redesigned;
- Added Python module for managing screen settings;
- Support for hidden, non-distracting notifications has been added to the notification system;
- An interface for managing system extensions has been added to the configurator;
- The application menu has been optimized for performance, the menu update mechanism has been redesigned, and the ability to hide categories with recent operations has been added;
- Added a visual effect when moving elements on the panel;
- The configurator has a built-in disk partition manager ;
- Added a setting to disable the touchpad when connecting an external mouse;
- Added support for a high-contrast theme in the window manager;
- In the Nemo file manager, the ability to manage the contents of the context menu has been added to the settings.
Source: opennet.ru