On behalf of the team and all the developers who contributed to this build, I am proud to announce the release of Cinnamon 2.4!

This new version will be featured in Linux Mint 17.1 “Rebecca” planned for the end of November and in LMDE 2 “Betsy” planned for Spring 2015.

Here’s a quick overview of some of the new things in Cinnamon 2.4.

Have a lot of fun with this new release and don’t hesitate to give us some feedback! Enjoy

Smoother Experience

A lot of care went into attention to details and Cinnamon 2.4 received many little improvements to make your experience smoother and more enjoyable than before.

Responsiveness and memory usage

CJS was rebased on a newer version of GJS in an effort to reduce memory usage and provide faster execution times.

All Cinnamon components were reviewed and their source code was checked with static analysis tools. Although most of them were small, about 30 memory leaks were fixed.

Icons used in Cinnamon Settings were added to the Mint-X icon theme. This increased responsiveness (This is specific to Linux Mint so we encourage all artists and distributions to do the same).

More polish

Credit to and similar to GNOME Shell, the Cinnamon desktop now starts with a zoom animation.

The login sound is now handled directly by Cinnamon (as opposed to cinnamon-settings-daemon) and plays in sync with the login sequence.

Modules in Cinnamon Settings and categories in the application menu are now sorted alphabetically.

Similar to Windows, “Super+e” now opens up the home directory.

Cinnamon 2.4 ships with many small refinements (multiple panel launchers, improvements in the sound applet, removal of the timeout in the logout dialog…etc) and a lot of bug fixes.

More settings and hardware support

Single-button touchpads are now supported (like the one used on the Macbook) and actions for 2-finger and 3-finger clicks are configurable. By default they correspond to right-click and middle-click.

Compositing in full-screen mode is now configurable and does not require to restart Cinnamon. This means less screen-tearing by default for most users and the option to undirect windows for gamers and users requiring an application to run at full speed without being impacted by the composition manager.

The desktop font is now configurable.

It is now possible to give the screensaver a custom date format, and custom fonts.

Improved Settings

The Theme Settings were completely redesigned:

The Background Settings were also completely redesigned and now support background slideshows:

Note: This change is accompanied by a new “Slideshow” applet. Add it to your panel to quickly pause/resume the slideshow or to skip to the next desktop background.

The Network Settings were rebased on GNOME’s latest configuration module:

Privacy Settings were added:

And Notification Settings:

Nemo improvements

The Nemo toolbar was redesigned and the presence of its button were made configurable. A new button (hidden by default) was added to open a terminal in the current directory.

A new extension called nemo-emblems adds emblem support to Nemo:

Along with folder-color-switcher, another project maintained by Linux Mint (credit goes to Marco Alvarez Costales and the Elementary project for their work and ideas on respectively customizing folder icons with colors and presenting context menus better in the file browser), Nemo now allows quick customization of folder icons. You can give them colors, emblems and basically make them look different from one another to quickly recognize or organize directories the way you want.

Finally, the sidebar is also improved, with highlight effects on hover and a smarter dynamic bookmark section.

Release notes