After 11 months of development, formed release of the desktop environment Cinnamon 6.8, within which the community of developers of the Linux Mint distribution is developing a fork of the GNOME Shell, Nautilus file manager and Mutter window manager, aimed at providing an environment in the classic GNOME 2 style with support for successful interaction elements from the GNOME Shell. Cinnamon is based on GNOME components, but these components are shipped as a periodically synchronized fork with no external dependencies to GNOME. The new release of Cinnamon will be offered in the Linux Mint 27 distribution (decided to use the release year in numbering), which is scheduled to be released in the second half of December.
- Full support for the Wayland protocol has been implemented and parity in functionality has almost been achieved when working using X11 and Wayland. Support for working using X11 is retained. Among the changes related to Wayland:
- When using Walyand, correct selection of the size and positioning of new windows, pop-up dialogs and context menus is ensured.
- When working through Walyand, correct switching of input focus is implemented.
- Many errors in Cinnamon, muffin, cinnamon-session and Xwayland, which led to crashes when using Wayland, have been eliminated.
- Improved support for multi-monitor configurations and KVM monitor switches in a Wayland environment.
- Applications using Wayland or launched through Xwayland, as well as in the composite server and desktop session, use hardware graphics acceleration implemented through the Wayland protocols wl_drm and zwp_linux_dmabuf_v1, as well as hardware accelerated GBM over EGL on NVIDIA video cards.
- Provides full support for high-density screens pixels (HiDPI) when using Wayland. Problems with scaling icons and mouse cursors have been resolved. Errors that appeared in applications based on the Chromium engine, such as Slack and VSCode, have been fixed.
- When using Wayland, operation progress indicators have been implemented, for example, showing the progress of copying files in a button on the panel.
- Basic applications launched via pkexec can be launched as Wayland clients without using Xwayland.
- A panel has been integrated into the file manager preview.
- Added new Superlight application for status tracking systems, clearly showing the dynamics of the load on the CPU, memory and I/O, as well as data on running processes, traffic, battery charge and temperature.
/Reports, release notes, official announcements.