The Cinnamon desktop environment is their main focus

Jan 31, 2019 14:38 GMT  ·  By

Linux Mint project leader Clement Lefebvre published today the monthly newsletter of the project to inform the community about their plans for improving the Ubuntu-based operating system and related components.

With the Linux Mint 19.1 "Tessa" out the door last month, the development team lead by Clement Lefebvre will now concentrate their efforts on improving various parts of the operating system like the live ISO images, which will get revamped boot and splash screens with possible support for language and keymap selections.

Another area that will get quite a lot of improvements is the Cinnamon desktop environment as the team is currently working on speeding up the loading time by optimizing two internal components, DocInfo and Appsys, as well as boosting the performance of the application menu and simplifying its use by replacing the "All applications" category with another one that lists recently used apps, as well as newly installed ones.

Cinnamon could be split into multiple processes to improve performance

Clement Lefebvre also revealed today that his team is working on some "under the hood" improvements for the Cinnamon desktop environment to boost its overall performance and make it as smooth as possible for users. As such, Jason Hicks continues to focus his efforts on improving the window manager and the grouped window list, and long-time developer Michael Webster is working on splitting Cinnamon into multiple processes.

"He's studying the possibility of having applets run in their own process and render objects remotely," says Lefebvre. "This is very ambitious and pretty much R&D at this point. We're hoping he'll succeed with a prototype. Failing that there's also the idea of keeping the rendering of the applet content in Cinnamon itself and only delegating the processing (similar to dbus–menu), or to keep Cinnamon and applets together and split away the WM."

Last but not least, the team has been working latetly on a new tool called cinnamon-stat-stracker, which promises to allow them to measure loading times and idle resource usage for CPU, RAM, etc., in an attempt to make future Linux Mint release snappier and less resource hungry. More details about the work the Linux Mint team is currently doing can be found in the latest monthly newsletter.