After a year of development, the Cinnamon 6.6 desktop environment has been released. The Linux Mint community is developing a fork of the GNOME Shell, Nautilus file manager, and Mutter window manager. This fork aims to provide an environment in the classic GNOME 2 style while maintaining the successful interaction elements of GNOME Shell. Cinnamon is based on GNOME components, but these components are delivered as a periodically synchronized fork, free of external dependencies from GNOME. The new Cinnamon release will be offered in Linux Mint 22.3, scheduled for release in the second half of December.
Main innovations:
- The application menu has been redesigned, featuring a sidebar with the user's avatar, favorites, and frequently used applications. Tooltips with application descriptions are now available when hovering over application names. Bookmarks and favorites are now displayed separately. Keyboard navigation has been simplified.
The program category list in the menu has been redesigned more compactly, using symbolic icons to clearly highlight categories. System buttons (screen lock, sleep, and power off) have been moved to the upper right corner, but settings have been added to move them to the bottom of the application menu or the sidebar. A setting has also been added to move the search bar to the bottom of the menu.
Settings for hiding various menu elements have been added to the configurator.
For example, you can hide the sidebar or customize its contents (bookmarks, favorite directories, frequently used applications, system buttons).
- The System Reports utility has been significantly expanded and renamed to the System Information application. In addition to pages with general system information and problem reporting, four new sections have been added with detailed information about connected USB devices, PCI components, GPUs, and BIOS (information about firmware, motherboard, and boot modes).
- A new "System Administration" application has been added. It runs with root privileges and includes administrator-specific information and settings. Currently, the application has one section, "Boot Menu," where you can control the boot menu display and change boot parameters.
- Instead of the Adwaita symbolic icon set, our own XSI (XApp Symbolic Icons) icon set is used.
- Keyboard handling has been redesigned to ensure full compatibility with Wayland. Support for switching keyboard layouts when using Wayland has been added, and input method support has been improved. Settings for traditional layouts and IBus input methods have been separated.
- The layout switching applet now supports different types of keyboard layouts and IBus.
- The on-screen keyboard has been redesigned to no longer use libcaribou and support layout switching.
- Instead of the libAdwaita library, a proprietary fork, libAdapta, is used. It features theme support and some additional features. Otherwise, libAdapta supports all the functionality of libAdwaita and provides an identical look and feel to applications by default.
- The xdg-desktop-portal-xapp package, which contains components for integrating standalone libAdwaita applications (such as those bundled in flatpak packages) with the desktop environment, now supports accent colors used to highlight active elements. These colors are determined by scanning GTK themes for a color with the "accent_color" identifier.
- Allowed to build Cinnamon without NetworkManager support.
- In the configurator, tile mode settings are now located in a separate tab. A section for configuring Thunderbolt device settings has been added.
- When switching between windows using Alt+Tab, only windows on the current monitor are shown.
- A Night Light applet has been added, allowing you to change the color temperature depending on the time of day. When working at night, the screen's blue light intensity is automatically reduced, creating a warmer color palette to reduce eye strain and reduce the risk of insomnia when working before bed.
- An option to show new notifications first has been added to the notification system. Icons have been implemented to indicate the number of unseen notifications.
Source: opennet.ru
