Announced via the Linux Mint Blog, Cinnamon 1.6 becomes official. It comes with a full compliment of new features and improvements to existing ones, including;
- Workspace Names
- Cinnamon 2D
- Configurable Alt-Tab
- Keyboard Navigation
- Expo Grid View
- Configurable Panel Heights
- Scale, Expo, Brightness Applets
- Windows Quick-list
- Notifications Applet
Also, Mint has officially unveiled Nemo, Linux Mint’s fork of Nautilus 3.4.
I certainly have not had many kind words to say about the Linux Mint distribution in the past, and not much of that has changed. But what is on offer here is certainly compelling and also indicative of a nearly mature desktop environment that is lacking less and less in critical features.
The most peculiar — and most sane — new feature is the inclusion of Cinnamon 2D. I say this because the aim of Cinnamon is to retain sane interfaces with a Gnome 2 like look and feel. Adding support for systems that cannot — or for people who will not — run Compiz, this is a real boon, but what about Mate?
The inclusion of a 2D capable desktop that offers the same level of operation as its Compiz counterpart makes Mate almost completely unnecessary.
Users of Mate are already dealt a fairly serious dependency burden, having to have all of Mate, and GTK3 dependencies so that they can use modern software as well. Cinnamon 2D eliminates this need and keeps the system’s package burden to a minimum. This means that there is much less chance for broken packages.
Users that are completely bent on using a Gnome 2 like desktop that is lighter than Cinnamon might be better off using a DE that is both actively maintained and developed as opposed to simply maintained with the only notable addition being the shoe-horned Mint menu. Some obvious choices are LXDE and XFCE.
Source | Linux Mint Blog
Dean Howell
