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More than six months have passed since the release of Cinnamon 4.8, and now it’s time for a new major release of this modern and lightweight desktop environment developed by the makers of and used for the popular Linux Mint distribution, Cinnamon 5.0.
Cinnamon 5.0 comes with many improvements to make Linux Mint’s default desktop environment more stable and reliable, including a memory limit mechanism so that it won’t eat up all the RAM on your personal computer.
One of the biggest change in Cinnamon 5.0 is the inclusion of new GUI and CLI tools for checking, listing, and performing updates of Cinnamon Spices, which includes applets, desklets, extensions, and themes. This means that you no longer have to rely on a third-party tool or go into Settings to update your Spices.
“Cinnamon 5 will ship with a command line tool called cinnamon-spice-updater which can list available updates and/or apply them,” said Clement Lefebvre. “To make it easy for distributions to integrate Cinnamon spice updates within their Update Manager a Python 3 module will also be provided.”
The window list applet received some attention during this cycle, now featuring the ability to keep track of window positions in the list to be able to restore your windows between restarts, but various improvements were also brought to the Menu, Network, Sound, and Power applets.
Of course, Cinnamon 5.0 includes numerous other bug fixes and smaller changes to support newer GNU/Linux technologies and perform more efficiently than ever. It also improves the scale effect on unmaximized windows, improves support for Flatpak apps, and removes the Alt+Tab Q keyboard shortcut for closing a window.
Cinnamon 5.0 is available for download right now from its GitHub page for Linux OS vendors who want to integrate it into their next major release or just provide their users with the latest update. It will also ship as the default desktop environment of the upcoming Linux Mint 20.2 “Uma” distribution.
Last updated 3 years ago
