Linux Mint launches Cinnamon 3.8: higher speed and many finishes
The Linux Mint project limae continues to develop its desktop environment, Cinnamon. With Cinnamon 3.8 come small news that promise to lead to a better overall user experience.
Linux Mint announced the launch of the latest version of Cinnamon, its desktop environment derived from GNOME. Cinnamon 3.8 brings many innovations, in particular ” under the body “.
There are no changes, but refinements of what is already present: compared to Cinnamon 3.6 launched last November, the new version now requires the libraries GTK 3.22, has seen the porting of all the components in Python to Python 3 (excluding file extensions Nemo manager).
Among the most significant news visible to the user:
- Some changes to the Muffin window manager make the opening of applications faster than before, making the user experience faster.
- Nemo is now faster in opening folders and showing their contents and has a simplified and faster search.
- Notifications are (finally) equipped with a close button, can be moved to the bottom of the screen and do not become transparent when the mouse hovers. The number is also limited to avoid overcrowding.
- It is now possible to establish a maximum volume between 0% and 150% that will be respected by the whole system.
- The keys to suspend, hibernate and rotate the screen are now shown in the lock screen.
- The touchpad is activated by default if there are no other pointing devices available.
- You can turn off the handset when you close the screen or when the battery level is too low.
- Pressing ” super ” and ” alt ” you can see the widgets (or Desklets) regardless of the application in use, similar to what happened, for example: in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.
This is just a short list of the many small improvements to the user experience that Cinnamon 3.8 offers (available in a more extensive form on the Linux Mint blog). The development team focused on responding to the needs raised by many over the years regarding the speed of the system and its usability.
Cinnamon 3.8 is already available in the repositories of some rolling release distributions, and will be available with Linux Mint 19, which is scheduled to launch next month. It will not be possible to install it on current versions of Linux Mint due to dependency on more modern libraries, not present in past versions.
