Cinnamon 4.6 Arrives with Fractional Scaling, Nemo Improvements, and More

Cinnamon 4.6

The Cinnamon 4.6 desktop environment has started appearing in the stable software repositories of popular GNU/Linux distributions, so I’ve compiled a list of the new features and improvements.

Announced earlier this year in January, the Cinnamon 4.6 desktop environment saw the light of day a couple of weeks ago. While there’s no official announcement for this major release, I did some digging to highlight the most important changes.

Probably the biggest new feature of Cinnamon 4.6 is support for fractional scaling on HiDPI/4K displays. The feature was finally implemented in the Display Settings panel under the Zoom Level drop-down.

Users will be able to choose values between 100% and 200%, such as 125%, 150%, 175%, for each of the connected monitors. Also in the Display Settings panel there’s now the ability to change the frequency of monitors.

Another major change is around the system tray applet, which has been modernized to offer better support for new Electron and Qt apps and indicators in all GNU/Linux distributions.

The Nemo file manager saw some major performance improvements as well. Nemo will now better handle thumbnails to prioritize content and navigation, which has a huge impact on performance when using Cinnamon on computers with old HDDs or under heavy I/O.

Other noteworthy changes include new keywords, custom icon size for the Menu applet, Python 3.8 compatibility, support for Nvidia On-Demand app launching in the menu, panel launcher, and gwl applets, as well as new keybindings to display the calendar, open the menu and clear notifications.

A pop-up will now be displayed when Cinnamon restarts and there’s a 2-second delay option when locking the screen. More button layout options are present as well in Cinnamon 4.6, along with a new button in the notifications applet settings to open the System Settings.

Smaller improvements were also made around the Sound applet, the hot corners feature, notifications system, grouped window list applet, keyboard applet, various animations and effects, Places Center, Calendar applet, and Cinnamon Settings.

Cinnamon 4.6 will be the default desktop environment of the upcoming Linux Mint 20 “Ulyana” operating system release, which should hit the streets in June based on Ubuntu 20.04 LTS (Focal Fossa).

Until then, if you want to use it on a different GNU/Linux distribution, such as Arch Linux, you can download and install the latest Cinnamon 4.6 packages from the stable repositories or just update your Cinnamon 4.4 installations.

Last updated 4 years ago

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