Cinnamon 1.6 nearing feature freeze
Source: Cinnamon
The next major update to the Cinnamon desktop environment is nearing its feature freeze and is well on its way to a release. In a blog post, Linux Mint founder and lead developer Clement "Clem" Lefebvre says that the development team is "extremely active" working towards the next 1.6.0 release of Cinnamon and he provides various details of the current state of development, including a list of planned features.
Among these new features is support for Workspace names, There will also be a 2D version of Cinnamon for systems without 3D/OpenGL hardware acceleration that will make use of llvmpipe to handle what would normally require a GPU on the CPU. Other planned changes include improvements to keyboard navigation, configurable Alt+Tab options and panel heights, and an Expo grid view.
"Cinnamon 1.6 is going to be a massive step forward," said Lefebvre, adding that "The codebase is now much smaller and much cleaner, a huge number of bugs have been fixed, most of the things people asked after 1.4 was released were implemented and we added some really cool and innovative features."
Source: Cinnamon GitHub
The developer goes on to note that the team is approximately 20 pull requests away from reaching the feature freeze. However, as usual, a release date for the new version has yet to be confirmed, with Lefebvre simply saying that the developers will release Cinnamon 1.6 when it's ready. Once 1.6 has arrived, the plan is to quickly release a number of point releases that will resolve bugs and other issues until the 1.6 branch is stable.
First announced in December of last year, Cinnamon is the Linux Mint project's fork of the GNOME Shell interface used in the GNOME 3 desktop. The fork aims to provide what its developers refer to as a traditional desktop layout with advanced features that are both powerful and easy to use. The current stable branch is Cinnamon 1.4. GPLv2-licensed source code for Cinnamon can be found on the project's GitHub page.
See also:
- Mint's Cinnamon desktop integrated into Fedora, a report from The H.
- Cinnamon 1.4 improves workspace management, a report from The H.
(crve)