Cinnamon 2.4 was released recently and it comes with improved settings, a redesigned toolbar for Nemo along with various other changes which bring a smoother overall experience.
For Cinnamon 2.4, the developers tried to make the desktop more responsive and smoother. To achieve this, about 30 memory leaks were fixed, CJS was rebased on a newer version of GJS in an effort to reduce memory usage and provide faster execution times and also, the icons used in Cinnamon Settings were added to Mint-X icon theme, which should provide increased responsiveness.
Furthermore, with the latest release, Cinnamon Settings has received a lot of attention:
- the theme module was redesigned and it now includes previews for themes which support this;
- the background module were redesigned and it now supports slideshows (to control this, a new slideshow applet was added);
- the Network Settings were rebased on GNOME's latest configuration module;
- two new Settings modules were added, for privacy and notifications.
 |
| Theme settings |
 |
| Background settings and the new Slideshow Controls applet |
 |
| New notification settings |
 |
| New privacy settings |
Other Cinnamon Settings changes include:
- single-button touchpads are now supported and actions for 2-finger and 3-finger clicks are configurable;
- 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;
- the screensaver now supports custom date format and custom fonts.
 |
| Screen Locker settings |
Nemo, the default Cinnamon file manager, has received various improvements, including a redesigned toolbar, improved sidebar with highlight effects on hover and a smarter dynamic bookmark section, as well as a new button (hidden by default) to open a terminal in the current directory.
Note for Ubuntu users: the new Nemo 2.4 is already available in the WebUpd8 Nemo (with Unity patches) PPA.
Furthermore, there are two new Nemo extensions: Nemo Emblems, which adds emblem support to Nemo, and Folder Color Switcher, an extension based on Marco Alvarez Costales' Folder Color, which allows changing any folder's icon color.
Other changes in Cinnamon 2.4:
- the Cinnamon desktop now starts with a zoom animation, similar to GNOME Shell;
- 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;
- other small refinements and a lot of bug fixes;
Getting Cinnamon 2.4
Linux Mint: Cinnamon 2.4 is already available in Romeo for Linux Mint 17. Also, Cinnamon 2.4 will be available by default in Linux Mint 17.1 Rebecca, which is planned for the end of this month and in LMDE 2 Betsy, planned for Spring 2015.
Ubuntu users: as you probably know, the official stable Cinnamon PPA is no longer available. For Ubuntu 14.04, you can install the latest Cinnamon 2.4 by using unofficial PPAs. For now, if you want to install the latest Cinnamon 2.4 in Ubuntu 14.10 or 15.04, you'll have to use the Cinnamon Nightly PPA (unstable).
For other Linux distributions, see the Cinnamon downloads page.
via LM segfault
