14 DAY TRIAL // While not officially announced, the Cinnamon 2.8 desktop environment has made an appearance on the project's GitHub page, and just by looking at the changelog, we can notice that it brings over 200 changes, including both new features and bugfixes.
Besides the well-known GNOME and KDE, Cinnamon is currently one of the most used desktop environments among members of the open-source community. It is installed by default in a number of popular GNU/Linux operating systems, including Debian, Linux Mint, Manjaro, Robolinux, and many others.
In the last couple of months, we've talked about the upcoming features of Cinnamon 2.8 in numerous articles. We’ve told you that the desktop environment will introduce device model and vendor information in the Power applet, better box pointers, a visual workspace switcher applet, and a revamped sound applet with media controls.
Today we will reveal even more of those awesome features implemented in Cinnamon 2.8. For example, there are better multi-monitor support, lots of improvements to the Alt+Tab preview mode, including faster switching animations, less background opacity and less delay, as well as multiple Power applet enhancements.
Improvements, lots of improvements
The Display applet now shows output names for multi-monitor configurations, enabling and disabling of applets works a lot better, and the Systray applet, Calendar applet, User settings, Window list applet, Menu applet, and Alt-F2 run dialog received various improvements as well, along with support for indicators.
And, of course, lots of unused code was removed, numerous crashes and other annoying issues reported by users since the previous release, Cinnamon 2.6, were addressed, and there are dozens of other minor under-the-hood improvements that will make a big impact on the overall performance of the desktop environment.
Those of you who can't wait any longer can download the Cinnamon 2.8 sources right now and start compiling by hand. However, it is recommended that you wait until the Cinnamon packages of your GNU/Linux operating system are updated to version 2.8.0. Cinnamon 2.8 will be the default desktop of Linux Mint 17.3 (Rosa), but in the meantime, check out the changelog below for details!