The new version will land in Linux Mint soon

Jun 2, 2015 09:51 GMT  ·  By

The Linux Mint team has just announced that Cinnamon 2.6 is finally stable and ready for download. They also detailed this latest release of the desktop environment, and it's got to be biggest update made until now.

Cinnamon is one of the most used desktop environments on Linux system, and it's used to power Linux Mint, which in turn is the second most used operating system after Ubuntu. It's safe to say that many users have been expecting this update, and they are going to receive it by the end of the month.

What is interesting about this upgrade is the sheer size of it and the fact that Cinnamon is actually at version 2.6.6. The developers have been updating this new branch for a couple of weeks now, and they have finally decided that it's stable enough for everyone.

Cinnamon 2.6 is a massive update

The developers started their announcement with a fix for some desktop freezes reported by the community. They have added a newer "cogl" API that should make most of the issues go away.

"In case of a freeze or if you need to restart Cinnamon for any reason, you can now do so via a keyboard shortcut. The default key combination is Ctrl+Alt+Escape. Pressing this combination of keys restarts nemo and cinnamon-settings-daemon in case they had crashed, and launches a brand new instance of the Cinnamon desktop," said Clement Lefebvre, the leader of the Linux Mint project.

Also, the devs have explained that it's no longer necessary to recompile Cinnamon to choose between consolekit and logind support, the load times have been greatly improved, the CPU usage has been diminished by about 40%, and the support for multiple monitors has been improved as well.

"Un-necessary calculations in the window management part of Cinnamon could also be dropped, leading to reduced idle CPU usage (about 40% reduction in the number of CPU wakes per second)," Lefebvre also noted.

Other smaller improvements include a working screensaver that does more than just lock the screen, panels that can be removed or added individually, a much better quot;System Settings" panel that should make things much clearer, cool new effect have been added for windows, and a brand-new plugin manager for Nemo.

This is just the tip of the iceberg for Cinnamon 2.6. You can download the source package from Softpedia. Please make sure that you check the full changelog below.

Cinnamon 2.6 Full Changelog