Cinnamon 2.4.....................
The new version of this desktop rewards existing users, but holds few surprises.
The Cinnamon desktop has come of age. In addition to Linux Mint, which leads its development, the desktop environment is popular among users of other distros who want a desktop that’s based on the latest libraries but sticks to the traditional desktop metaphor. In three years of existence, Cinnamon has grown from a fork into a standalone desktop of its own, which has been adding new features and functionality with every subsequent release.
With all the core components in place and its usability polished to a buff, the developers are now focusing on enriching the user experience. The latest release includes many features that the desktop has borrowed (with proper attribution) from other popular desktop environments and even from proprietary operating systems.
For example, the new release features a revamped Background Settings window that can now cycle through background images, as they do in Windows 8. This feature also brings along a new applet that you can add to your panel to control the background slideshow. There’s also a new extension called nemo-emblems which enables you to add emblems to any content displayed by the Nemo file manager. Nemo itself features an improved sidebar, a redesigned toolbar and gets a new context-menu item to open a terminal in the current directory.
Also, as you'll find in Windows, the Super+E keyboard shortcut has been added to launch the home directory. The desktop supports single-button touchpads like the ones on the MacBook and you can customise the actions for multi-finger taps. The desktop also borrows the zoom launch effect from the Gnome Shell and the Network Settings window is based on Gnome’s as well.
Spring clean release
Cinnamon 2.4 has several UI improvements: a number of modules in the desktop’s Control Panel have been redesigned for easier operation, such as Theme Settings which now has a new theme selection mechanism. The Panel Settings now let you place multiple panels on the desktop and you can control the size of their icons and text individually. There’s also a new Privacy Settings window, where you can ask the desktop not to keep a record of recently accessed files or purge the list after a preset duration. You can also control the appearance and behaviour of notifications with a dedicated section.
The developers have also made some background changes, reviewing the code and its various components with static analysis tools, which has fixed several bugs as well as some 30 memory leaks. This has caused several minor refinements and changes, such as the removal of the timeout in the logout window. Furthermore, you can configure compositing in full-screen mode without restarting the desktop, and the developers have tweaked the code of the composition manager to improve performance of games.
At first glance, Cinnamon 2.4 doesn’t look all that different from the previous release, and if you haven’t experienced any performance issues with previous releases, you won’t notice any major performance gains with this one. But the developers have been toiling hard to iron out the unseen issues in the underlying code and introduce some minor but much requested features in the foreground. Cinnamon 2.4 isn’t designed to attract new users but reward existing ones. In Linux Mint tradition, the desktop is released a month or so before it's included in the latest release, which for Cinnamon 2.4 was Linux Mint 17.1, so it’s available to download now.