After 7 months of development, the release of the Cinnamon 5.8 user environment has been formed, 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 an environment in the classic GNOME 2 style with support for successful interaction elements from the GNOME Shell . Cinnamon builds 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 21.2 distribution, which is scheduled for release at the end of June.
Main innovations:
- Work with themes has been reorganized and the structure of themes has been simplified. For example, brown and sand colors have been unified, support for colored stripes on pictograms has been removed, where symbolic pictograms may be involved.
- Added the concept of styles that offer three color modes for interface elements: mixed (dark menus and controls with a general light window background), dark and light. For each mode, you can choose your own color variant. Styles and color options allow you to get popular interface templates without having to select separate skins.
- The file manager uses new two-tone icons and multi-threaded thumbnail generation is enabled.
- Changed the design of tooltips.
- Increased padding between applets in the panel.
- Notifications use symbolic icons and colors used to highlight active elements (accent).
- Added dark settings common to all applications, allowing you to select three options: light theme preferred, dark theme preferred, and the mode selects the application.
- Added the ability to control windows and virtual desktops using on-screen gestures, as well as the use of gestures for tiling and controlling the playback of multimedia content. Gestures on touch screens and touchpads are supported.
- The program interface for installing applications has been redesigned, algorithms for sorting and grouping applications have been improved. The touchegg package is used to define gestures.
- Added a setting to change the mouse pointer after the completion of the Alt+Tab action.
- Added a setting to change the behavior of the middle mouse button, which is used by default for pasting from the clipboard.
- Added setting to disable low battery warning on connected external devices.
- Redesigned and included background effects.
- Redesigned window grouping and sound control applets.
- A separate style has been added to the menu for selected categories.
- Added the ability to resize applets with the mouse, which is included in the menu applet. Added settings to return the original size of the menu and resize depending on the zoom factor.
- Added an item to the context menu shown for applets to call the menu editor.
- Added the ability to use the Switcheroo VGA subsystem to switch between different GPUs on laptops with hybrid graphics.
- The login screen provides support for switching between multiple keyboard layouts. Improved keyboard navigation. Implemented the ability to customize the layout in the on-screen keyboard.
- Changed the user interface in the Pix imager, which has been moved to the gThumb 3.12.2 codebase (previously used gThumb 3.2.8). Instead of a toolbar and a classic menu, there are buttons and a drop-down menu in the header. Added support for AVIF/HEIF and JXL formats. Added support for color profiles. The generation of large thumbnails is allowed (512, 768 and 1024 pixels). Improved scaling control. Added new effects and image editing tools.
- The CJS JavaScript binding set has been migrated to use GJS 1.74 and the SpiderMonkey 102 (Mozjs 102) JavaScript engine. Previously used SpiderMonkey 78.
- Added implementation of Freedesktop portals (xdg-desktop-portal), used to organize access to user environment resources from isolated applications (for example, for flatpak packages, using portals, you can provide the ability to create screenshots and add support for a dark theme).
Source: opennet.ru