Wednesday, October 14, 2015

Cinnamon 2.2 Released With System Settings Improvements, HiDPI support And More

Cinnamon 2.2 was released today, bringing various improvements to the System Settings, HiDPI/Retina Display support, client side decorations support along with other interesting refinements.

cinnamon 2.2


With Cinnamon 2.2, the System Settings UI was refined, making it look more consistent and also, the settings are better categorized, this allowing the Cinnamon developers to remove the switch between normal and advanced settings modules.

cinnamon 2.2
Cinnamon Settings

cinnamon 2.2
Date and Time settings

cinnamon 2.2
Hot Corners settings

cinnamon 2.2
Lock Screen settings


Cinnamon Settings improvements:
  • Hot Corners and HUD:
    • the HUD now only appears if you drag a window really close to the edge;
    • hot corners: you can now define whether to react on hover, click or both;
  • Screensaver and Power Management: there's now a clear separation between the Lock Screen and Power Management settings;
  • Date and Time: the original Date and Time module was brought back and also, options such as "Use 24 hour clock" were added to Cinnamon's calendar applet, clock desk and the screensaver;
  • Regional Settings and Keyboard Layouts: the Regional Settings module was removed entirely (letting the distribution manage this), with the exception of Keyboard Layouts, which was moved to the Keyboard settings module.

Another interesting improvement added with Cinnamon 2.2 is the way applets work: each applet is now able to register "roles" which tell Cinnamon which functionality they provide and this is used to allow Cinnamon to automatically hide systay icons for which the functionality is already present in an applet. 

Here's an example from the Cinnamon 2.2 release announcement: "Say you remove the network applet, well... you’ll see the Network Manager GTK systray icon appear. Say you put the network applet back in the panel, the Network Manager systray icon will then disappear."


Nemo, the default Cinnamon file manager, has also received various improvements which include HiDPI support, a recent place sidebar item, tab switching using ctrl+(shift+)+tab, a new folder button was added to the toolbar and various bug fixes:

Nemo 2.2


Other changes in the latest Cinnamon 2.2:
  • HiDPI/Retina Display support (requires GTK 3.10);
  • Support for CSD (client side decorations);
  • Menu:
    • option to uninstall applications from the menu (right click and select "Uninstall");
    • newly installed applications are now highlighted in the menu;
  • MPRIS support, so you can interact with MPRIS compatible software not only from the sound applet but also from your multimedia keys;
  • The "wacom" plugin is back;
  • A11y MouseWheel Zoom;
  • You can now shade windows or change their opacity by using your mouse wheel on their titlebar. This options is available in System Settings > Windows;
  • CJS gsettings wrapper (no more segmentation faults when an old applet queries a Cinnamon gsettings key which no longer exists… CJS intercepts the call and deals with it);
  • Better integration with GNOME on the same machine (you should no longer see GNOME Control Center in Cinnamon, or Cinnamon Settings in GNOME);
  • Better support for GDM (in particular for user-switching);
  • Better support for Xrandr cloning;
  • Better systemd/logind support;
  • Fixed blacklight/brightness support on some hardware;
  • Better support for VLC screensaver inhibit;
  • Compatibility with new interfaces such as modemmanager1, upower1;
  • Many other improvements and bug fixes.

cinnamon 2.2
You can now shade windows or change their opacity by using your mouse wheel on their titlebar

cinnamon 2.2

cinnamon 2.2
Modal dialog used by the Nemo about window (Despite what the about dialog says, this is actually not Nemo 2.0.8 but 2.2+git)


Getting Cinnamon


Linux Mint users: the Cinnamon 2.2 release announcement didn't mention anything about Cinnamon 2.2 and its availability in Linux Mint 16 but according to a comment by Clem posted HERE, it looks like Cinnamon 2.2 won't be backported to Linux Mint 16. Cinnamon 2.2 should be available by default with Linux Mint 17 (planned for the end of May).

Ubuntu users: the Cinnamon Stable PPA wasn't updated with the latest Cinnamon 2.2 yet. Also, the Cinnamon Nightly PPA wasn't updated for Ubuntu 13.10, 12.10 and 12.04 for about 3 weeks so if you use it right now, you won't get all the changes available in Cinnamon 2.2. The Nightly PPA has up to date packages only for Ubuntu 14.04 but, since this is a nightly PPA, you shouldn't use it on a production machine! Important note: if you do use the Cinnamon Nightly PPA, you must manually install the "gir1.2-cmenu-3.0" package or else Cinnamon won't start.

For other Linux distributions, see the Cinnamon downloads page.


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