It's coming soon to a GNU/Linux distribution near you

Apr 24, 2018 21:35 GMT  ·  By

While not yet officially announced, the Cinnamon 3.8 desktop environment has been released and it's already available in the repositories of some popular GNU/Linux distributions, such as Arch Linux.

Scheduled to ship with the upcoming Linux Mint 19 "Tara" operating system series this summer, the Cinnamon 3.8 desktop environment is now available for download and it's a major release that brings numerous improvements, new features, and lots of Python 3 ports for a bunch of components.

Among the components that got ported to Python 3 in the Cinnamon 3.8 release, we can mention cinnamon-settings, cinnamon-menu-editor, cinnamon-desktop-editor, cinnamon-settings-users, melange, background slideshow, the switch editor and screensaver lock dialogs, desktop file generation scripts, as well as all the utilities.

As for the enhancements implemented in Cinnamon 3.8, we can mention that the screensaver's away message dialog was simplified, the Sound Applet's middle click mute functionality was refined and the sound volume bar is refreshed when the maximum sound volume changes, which is now configurable in the Sound Settings.

The Sound Applet also received support for changing the next or previous track on mouse scroll right or left, a new setting to preserve the aspect ratio, improvements to the control buttons, and the ability to no longer display the player launcher when the option to control players is disabled.

Notifications can now be positioned at the bottom

Cinnamon 3.8 also adds support for the system notifications to be positioned the bottom of the screen, including on multi-monitor setups, makes the window animations are now a bit less drastic, renames the Effects tab in Sounds Settings, and adds defaults for Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux and CentOS operating system in Cinnamon Settings.

Other than that, the Power Applet's device label is now truly hidden if no devices are connected, the Window List preview received new style class, layout, and options, system notifications are no longer cleared when an app gains focus, resident notifications will now display properly, and it's now possible to raise desklets above windows.

With Cinnamon 3.8, the gksu GTK+ frontend for sudo is no longer used, the app-switcher will respect the same setting as the Alt-tab task switcher, and users can now toggle the visibility of desklets from the Show Desktop applet context menu. Additionally, a new app switcher option will let users cycle windows on the current workspace.

Cinnamon 3.8 also removes support for GNOME's JHBuild tool, as well as the cinnamon-extension-tool component, add a new "Shutdown Immediately" entry was added to the "lid close" and "power critical" messages, and will finally let users install third-party spices from a local folder. Countless bugs were fixed as well.