This stable release feature lots of optimizations and improvements

May 6, 2013 18:31 GMT  ·  By

After seven months of hard work, Clement Lefebvre proudly announced yesterday, May 5, that his wonderful and powerful Cinnamon desktop environment, a fork of GNOME 3, reached version 1.8.

Cinnamon 1.8 brings lots of new features, many improvements, as well as the usual bug fixes and translation updates.

“On behalf of the team and all the developers who contributed to this build, I am proud to announce the release of Cinnamon 1.8!”

“Cinnamon 1.8 represents 7 months of development and 1,075 commits. It features a lot of bug fixes but also brand new features and many improvements,” Clement Lefebvre said in the official release announcement.

With Cinnamon 1.8, the Nemo file manager received a revamped user interface and better integration with the desktop environment. Users will be able to easily switch back and forth between treeview and places and hide the sidebar.

A screensaver has been introduced with this new stable version of Cinnamon, allowing users to define an “Away” message before locking up their screen. Therefore, if anyone is looking for you, it will see that message right away.

Cinnamon 1.8 no longer requires the GNOME Control Center, as all the configuration modules have been implemented in the Cinnamon Settings app.

Another piece of good news for Cinnamon users is the initial support for Desklets, which are some kind of widgets or applets, but for your desktop, not panel. Think of them like Plasmoids on KDE. The GNOME desktop environment also uses Desklets, but now Cinnamon has its own, and it ships with three desklets: a launcher, a photoframe and a clock.

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Cinnamon 1.8 also allows users to install the so-called “Cinnamon Spices,” such as applets, themes, desklets or extensions, straight from the desktop, without the need to access the Cinnamon website.

Last but not least, there’s a new API for developers who want to develop Cinnamon applets and desklets, hot-corner configuration works better now, coverflow Alt-Tab and timeline Alt-Tab shortcuts have been added, and the horizontal/vertical maximizing of windows has been improved.

Download Cinnamon 1.8 right now from Softpedia. Also, don’t forget to check out our brand-new Cinnamon Themes section of the latest artwork.