Cinnamon 5.2 Desktop Environment Released, This Is What’s New

Cinnamon 5.2

Five and a half months after the release of Cinnamon 5.0, Linux Mint’s flagship desktop environment has been updated to version 5.2, a major release that comes with new features and many enhancements.

Cinnamon 5.2 is packed with an improved Menu applet that now features better keyboard navigation for RTL (Right-to-Left) languages, symbolic icons for all apps, the ability to hide the app buttons by default and when the menu is closed, support for displaying completion results only when the file system path entry is enabled, and the ability to show refreshed menu items while the menu is open.

Also improved in this release is the Sound applet, which no longer shows “Unknown Artist” on the panel and improves both the media control buttons and player status label with RTL layouts, as well as the Keyboard applet, which now correctly show icon sizes when the panel is vertical.

The Calendar applet has been improved as well in Cinnamon 5.2 with support for GNOME’s Evolution Data Server unified backend for apps that handle contacts, tasks, and calendar information. Moreover, the Notifications applet received a new “Don’t show notification count in tray” setting if you don’t want to see a notification count in the system tray notification icon.

Cinnamon’s GWL (grouped windows list) component was also improved in this release to automatically update the AppGroup icon every time a new window is added to the group, no longer force the “New Window” option to be displayed, fix a window preview issue when the fade-out effect is used, and to remove the redundant check when skipping the taskbar.

Among other noteworthy changes, Cinnamon 5.2 comes with an option to disable scrolling in the workspace-switcher applet, the ability to check if a Cinnamon Spice is currently enabled or not, the ability to disable Cinnamon as the default handler for notifications, a new confirmation dialog when removing a panel, a new toggle to turn the window labels on or off, and improved RTL support for the window button layout setting.

Cinnamon 5.2 also respects the PrefersNonDefaultGPU desktop entry when launching apps with either the dedicated or integrated GPUs, adds support for Python 3.10 to the menu-editor, improves window ordering with vertical panels, simplifies window animations, adds a radial shader effect to the Lightbox, adds some styling to the Run dialog, and better handles album art for the Spotify app.

When will Cinnamon 5.2 be available in my distro? Well, one thing is for sure, Linux Mint 20.3 “Una” will ship with Cinnamon 5.2 by default, but, if you can’t wait until its official release in December, you should be able to install it in Arch Linux in the coming days. You can also download the source tarball if you want to compile it yourself.

Last updated 2 years ago

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