14 DAY TRIAL // Thanks to a news tip we've received earlier today, we now know that work on the next major release of the Cinnamon desktop environment has apparently begun, and a lot of improvements are being planned for Cinnamon 3.2 later this year.
Yes, that's right, Cinnamon 3.2 will be the drop-in replacement for the current stable release of the acclaimed desktop environment, Cinnamon 3.0, which has been officially shipped today, June 30, 2016, to users of the Linux Mint operating system as part of the Linux Mint 18 "Sarah" announcement.
So now that Linux Mint 18 is officially out, it's time for the developers of the Ubuntu-based distribution to concentrate all of their efforts on the next major release, Linux Mint 18.1. You might want to know that it will ship with Cinnamon 3.2 and MATE 1.16 desktop environments, as well as with numerous other exciting new features, such as support for Flatpak and Snap universal packages.
According to the Linux Mint 18.1 roadmap, there are a lot of improvements and bug fixes planned for Cinnamon 3.2. Among the ones that caught out interest is the adoption of a new layout for the Menu applet in the style of a custom GNOME 3 menu layout (see the screenshot attached at the end of the article), but better looking.
Vertical panels, Printer applet, HiDPI improvements, and much more
Among other new features coming to the Cinnamon 3.2 desktop environment, we can mention a new Printer applet, vertical panels, improvements to the sensitivity settings under Mouse & Touchpad, such as the ability to reset them, as well as support for switching the sound output to HDMI if a supported device is plugged in.
There will be a lot of HiDPI fixes as well, better low battery notifications on laptops, a lot of enhancements to the Nemo file manager, improvements to multi-monitor setups, better PEAP authentication support in the NetworkManager applet, the ability to lock desklets, and the use of search providers to search local files in the Menu applet.
Of course, there will be many other small yet important improvements implemented in the Cinnamon 3.2 desktop environment. Then, numerous issues reported by users since Cinnamon 3.0 have been fixed. Below, we've attached the entire roadmap for Cinnamon 3.2, but please keep in mind that some of the changes might not land.
