After five months of development, The new version of the Cinnamon 4.4 desktop environment has just been announced, in which frame is developed by part of the distribution community the distribution Linux Mint and which is a fork of the Gnome Shell, the Nautilus file manager, and the Mutter window manager, with the goal of providing the classic Gnome 2 style environment with support for successful Gnome Shell interaction elements.
Cinnamon is based on Gnome components, but these components are shipped as a periodically synchronized fork that is not externally related to Gnome.
What's new in Cinnamon 4.4?
In this new version of Cinnamon, it is highlighted in the ad that work was done to improve support on screens with high pixel density (HiDPI). In the language and repository settings, the icons have been replaced with flags that, due to the scale on HiDPI screens, were blurred.
Besides that XAppStatus applet and XApp.StatusIcon API are proposed, They implement an alternative mechanism for placing icons with application flags on the systray.
XApp.StatusIcon solves the problems that arise when using Gtk.StatusIcon, designed for use 16 pixel icons, has HiDPI issues and is tied to legacy technologies like Gtk.Plug and Gtk.Socket, which are not supported by GTK4 and Wayland.
Gtk.StatusIcon also involves application-side rendering, not in the applet. To solve these problems, Ubuntu proposed the AppIndicator system, but it does not support all the functionality of Gtk.StatusIcon and generally requires applet processing.
XApp.StatusIcon, like the AppIndicator, displays the icon drawing, tooltip, and label on the side of the applet, and uses DBus to transfer information through applets.
The rendering on the side of the applet provides high-quality icons of any size and solves display problems. It supports the transfer of click events from the applet to the application, which is also done via the DBus bus.
For compatibility with other desktops, an App.StatusIcon appendix has been prepared, which determines the presence of an applet and, if necessary, returns to Gtk.StatusIcon, which allows you to display icons from old Gtk.StatusIcon-based applications.
In addition, the layout of the elements in the dialog boxes has been improved, Settings have been added to control the layout of elements in windows and change focus when opening new windows.
Of the other changes that stand out:
- The panel simplified and redesigned the context menu.
- Added Python module to manage display settings.
- Has been added support for hidden notifications, which is not distracting, to the notification system.
- Has been added an interface to manage system extensions to the configurator.
- In the application menu, performance optimization has been carried out, the mechanism for updating the menu has been revised, and the ability to hide a category with recent operations has been added.
- Added visual effect when moving items on the panel.
- The gnome-disks disk partition manager is built into the configurator.
- Added settings to disable touchpad when connecting external mouse.
- Support for high contrast themes has been added in the window manager.
- In Nemo file manager, the ability to manage context menu content has been added to settings.
How to install Cinnamon 4.4 on Ubuntu and derivatives?
For those who are interested in being able to install this new version of the desktop environment, You can do it for now by downloading the source code of this and compiling from your system.
Because even the packages have not been updated in the official repository, they must wait, it usually takes a few days.
This repo can be added from a terminal by typing:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:embrosyn/cinnamon sudo apt-get update
And they will be able to install with:
sudo apt install cinnamon
Finally it is important to mention that this new Cinnamon release will be offered on Linux Mint 19.3, which will be released before the Christmas holidays.
Although in the case of Arch Linux the package is already within the AUR repositories.