14 DAY TRIAL // Linux Mint's Clement Lefebvre reports today on the upcoming performance improvements that he and his team of developers implemented in the next major release of the Cinnamon desktop environment.
As you probably know already, Cinnamon is the default desktop environment of the Ubuntu-based Linux Mint operating system. It uses parts of the GNOME Stack at its core, which means that it's not so lightweight as its MATE or Xfce counterparts, so launching apps isn't as fast as you'd like it to be lately.
That's why the Linux Mint development team spent some time earlier this year to investigate and debug any performance hogs in Cinnamon, especially when launching the pre-installed applications. They compared Cinnamon with the Metacity window manager and found out that the former was six times slower.
They also compared Cinnamon's Muffin window management library with Metacity using an in-house built script and discovered that it also suffers of performance issues, so they had to discover the actual reason behind the slowness and resolve it once and for all for the upcoming Cinnamon release.
"We then measured Muffin on its own and found out that although the performance was better than in Cinnamon, the numbers were higher than with Metacity. We, therefore, had performance issues both in Muffin and in Cinnamon," said Clement Lefebvre, Linux Mint project leader and founder.
Faster app-launching coming soon to Cinnamon and Linux Mint
To fix the performance issues and make apps launch faster, or at least as fast as in GNOME's Metacity, the Linux Mint development team had to apply two upstream commits in Muffin and four other commits in Cinnamon itself, which apparently fixed the bottlenecks discovered in the panel launchers and window list.
All the technical details are available here for the tech-savvy, as for the rest of the Linux Mint fans, expect faster app-launching in the next Cinnamon desktop environment that will be released this spring as part of the forthcoming Linux Mint 19 "Tara" operating systems, which will be based on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver).