New Cinnamon 1.6 Released with 2D Session and More Features

Cinnamon 1.6 represents 4 months of development and 626 commits. It features a lot of bug fixes but also brand new features and many improvements.

Workspace OSD
Workspace OSD

Major changes in Cinnamon 1.6:

  • Cinnamon 2D session (uses software rendering)
  • Workspace OSD: you can now name the workspaces (which are persistent in Cinnamon)
  • ALT + Tab improvements: you can now use thumbnails or previews
  • Improved sound applet: larger album cover, mute buttons for speakers and microphone and more
  • Grid View in Expo
  • The panel is fully customizable: options to configure auto-hide delay and the panel height have been added to Cinnamon Settings.
  • many other improvements and bug fixes

Workspace OSD

Workspaces are “persistent” in Cinnamon. This means you can create a workspace whenever you want by clicking the “+” button and it will remain there until you decide to delete it. You can log off or even reboot, your workspaces will remain the way you defined them. In Cinnamon 1.6 you can give them a name. When you switch workspaces, the workspace name appears on the screen. So you always know where you are.

The Workspace OSD (On-Screen-Display) is also configurable. You can set its duration, its position on the screen and whether you want it to show up or not.

Alt-Tab Thumbnails and Window Previews

The Alt-Tab window switcher is now configurable. Cinnamon 1.6 features the following switchers:

  • Icons (default, similar to Cinnamon 1.4)
  • Icons + Thumbnails
  • Icons + Window Previews
  • Window Previews
Alt-Tab with Icons and Thumbnails
Alt-Tab with Icons and Thumbnails

“Window Previews” shows a preview of the selected window while switching with an effect similar to the Compiz Fusion switcher. The window in question comes to the front of the screen and is displayed prominently. If the theme defines it, the window can also be highlighted with an outline border/color.

Cinnamon 2D session

In my test, the Cinnamon 2D session was very slow, even though my computer is pretty fast, so it seems this feature isn’t ready yet. And in fact, in the Cinnamon 1.6 release notes it’s mentioned that Cinnamon 2D is used to “troubleshoot compatibility problems with Cinnamon“, so it doesn’t look like it’s intended for everyday use just yet.

Improved Sound Applet

Music lovers will enjoy some of the improvements in the Sound Applet.

More prominent cover art and improved layout in the sound applet

The layout was reworked to give the cover artwork more space. The volume slider now features a visible percentage and no longer controls amplification past 100% (although this was handy in Cinnamon 1.4, it was confusing and led to people experiencing sound saturation). The applet now also comes with tooltips and mute buttons for the sound and the microphone (accessible via the right-click menu).

Get Cinnamon

To install Cinnnamon 1.6 in Ubuntu 12.10 or 12.04, you can use the Cinnamon stable PPA which has just been updated with the latest Cinnamon:

Ubuntu user:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gwendal-lebihan-dev/cinnamon-stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install cinnamon

Once installed, log out and select Cinnamon in the GDM / LightDM / MDM login screen.

For other Linux distributions, see the Cinnamon download page.

Arch Linux user:

Install cinnamon-git from AUR

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