Cinnamon 5.8 Desktop Released with Gestures, Dark Mode, Styles, and More

Cinnamon notifications received support for accent colors and the tooltips have been redesigned across the entire desktop.
Cinnamon 5.8

The Cinnamon 5.8 desktop environment has been released and it’s already available in the stable software repositories of Arch Linux, so I wanted to give you guys a first look at the new features and improvements.

There are several cool new features in Cinnamon 5.8 and one of them is XDG Desktop Portal support to provide better compatibility for Flatpak apps, as well as GNOME/libadwaita apps. This makes it possible for these apps to take screenshots.

In addition, this feature brings a global dark mode setting for applications that support it. There are three options to choose from, including Prefer light, Prefer dark, and Let the applications decide.

Another awesome new feature in Cinnamon 5.8 is support for gestures on touchpads, touchscreens, and tablets. These gestures can be used for window management, workspace management, tiling, as well as media controls.

Cinnamon 5.8 also introduces a new concept called “styles” to make your desktop environment look great. For this, each style comes with three modes, namely mixed, dark, and light, as well as accent colors. In the Mixed mode, most applications are light and some desktop elements are dark to create contrast.

The tooltips have been redesigned to be more consistent across various GTK versions (GTK2, GTK3) and Cinnamon, and they now use accent colors as well. Tooltips in Cinnamon are now bigger, rounder, and with larger margins. They also now have a bit of space between applets so that they won’t stuck to the panel.

The same goes for notifications, which also use accent colors and, whenever possible, they will now prefer symbolic icons. I should mention the fact that the accent color options do not appear in the Themes panel on other distributions than Linux Mint, but you can use advanced settings to change them.

Nemo, Cinnamon’s default file manager, received support for multi-threaded thumbnails. This is a performance improvement as Nemo will now need fewer CPU resources when generating thumbnails as it’s capable of generating multiple thumbnails in parallel instead of generating each thumbnail one by one. With this enhancement, your large folders will now open faster.

Several Cinnamon applets received improvements, including the Grouped Window List and Sound applets. Moreover, the Menu applet can now be resized using the mouse pointer, comes with a new button in settings to let you restore its original size, and lets you more quickly edit the menu via the applet’s right-click context menu.

Other than that, Cinnamon 5.8 adds keyboard shortcuts for warping the mouse pointer between monitors on multi-monitor setups, adds the ability to paste the current selection with middle-click (enabled by default in Mouse & Touchpad settings), and adds the ability to disable low battery warnings for connected devices in the Power Management settings.

Cinnamon 5.8 also makes use of the vga_switcheroo Linux subsystem for GPU offloading on laptops with hybrid graphics and adds a new option in Windows’ Alt+Tab settings to warp the mouse pointer to the newly focused window after the Alt+Tab action completes.

Under the hood, Cinnamon 5.8 comes with an updated CJS, the Cinnamon Javascript interpreter, that was rebased on GJS 1.74 and makes use of SpiderMonkey (libmozjs) 102. This should give Cinnamon a performance boost.

As mentioned before, Cinnamon 5.8 already landed in Arch Linux’s stable repos, but it should soon arrive in the repositories of other popular distributions. Cinnamon 5.8 will be the default desktop environment of the upcoming Linux Mint 21.2 “Victoria” distribution release, due out later this month.

If you try it, do let me know what you think about it in the comments below!

Last updated 10 months ago

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