Cinnamon is the flagship desktop environment for Linux Mint. Developed in-house by the Linux Mint team, it provides a traditional desktop experience without the bloat.
It is known to provide a stable and familiar experience for those who are switching from Windows, offering up modern features and polish that keeps people loyal to it.
Recently, the developers introduced Cinnamon 6.6 with some pretty interesting changes.
Cinnamon 6.6: What's New?
The menu received the most significant changes with this release. Special categories now appear at the bottom and system buttons at the top instead of being mixed with regular items.
It has also received updates to make avatars optional, show colors when hovering over system buttons, toggle between symbolic/full-color icons, the ability to customize places/bookmarks, and a new category icon set, xapp-symbolic-icons.
On the interface side of things, Cinnamon has ditched Tweener in favor of easing for animations. This affects how window managers, alt-tab switchers, applets, and desklets behave. There is also a dedicated night light applet now, and the feature itself gains an "always" schedule mode option.
For applets in general, window lists (shown in the taskbar) have gained notification badge support. The grouped window list also got a hover behavior fix.
The workspace switcher similarly gained an option to display window icons on workspace thumbnails, and the sound applet addresses an issue where album art disappeared after changing the volume. Theme handling got some attention too; themes now get sorted into groups with a new menu structure.
Other Changes and Improvements
We round out this release coverage with some additional changes worth your attention:
- A reset zoom keyboard shortcut was added as a usability tweak.
- Polkit authentication agent allows root authentication if no admin users exist.
- The calendar server now refreshes remote calendars when the event list is opened.
- Tiling preferences have been moved to their own tab in the Cinnamon settings menu.
📥 Get Cinnamon 6.6
As I said earlier, Linux Mint 22.3 "Zena" will feature this Cinnamon release. But you have to wait for its development to conclude.
Meanwhile, you could build Cinnamon 6.6 from source (also has the changelog file). Or opt for a rolling release distro like EndeavourOS, CachyOS, and Arch Linux; these should have it in their repos.
Suggested Read 📖: Best Rolling Release Linux Distros
Abhishek Prakash
