Cinnamon 2.4 and Future CSB Roadmap

Clem has announced the availability of Cinnamon 2.4 which should be premiered on LinuxMint 17.1 (Rebecca) by the end of this month. It has lots of improvements and bug fixes which is very pleasing for end-users.

Here are some of the highlights of this release:

Responsiveness and memory usage

• CJS was rebased on a newer version of GJS in an effort to reduce memory usage and provide faster execution times.
• All Cinnamon components were reviewed and their source code was checked with static analysis tools. Although most of them were small, about 30 memory leaks were fixed.
• Icons used in Cinnamon Settings were added to the Mint-X icon theme. This increased responsiveness (This is specific to Linux Mint so we encourage all artists and distributions to do the same).

More polish

• Credit to and similar to GNOME Shell, the Cinnamon desktop now starts with a zoom animation.
• The login sound is now handled directly by Cinnamon (as opposed to cinnamon-settings-daemon) and plays in sync with the login sequence.
• Modules in Cinnamon Settings and categories in the application menu are now sorted alphabetically.
• Similar to Windows, “Super+e” now opens up the home directory.
• Cinnamon 2.4 ships with many small refinements (multiple panel launchers, improvements in the sound applet, removal of the timeout in the logout dialog…etc) and a lot of bug fixes.

More settings and hardware support

• Single-button touchpads are now supported (like the one used on the Macbook) and actions for 2-finger and 3-finger clicks are configurable. By default they correspond to right-click and middle-click.
• Compositing in full-screen mode is now configurable and does not require to restart Cinnamon. This means less screen-tearing by default for most users and the option to undirect windows for gamers and users requiring an application to run at full speed without being impacted by the composition manager.
• The desktop font is now configurable.
• It is now possible to give the screensaver a custom date format, and custom fonts.

I'm targeting this version as my next milestone for my CSB project along with next Slackware release. I can't support Cinnamon 2.4 under Slackware 14.1 since it requires many new packages which aren't yet available under 14.1. Asking users to upgrade those libraries is not an option, since it may break many other applications and user experiences.

We will just have to wait for 2.4 to land in Slackware :)