It will be the default desktop of Linux Mint 18.2 "Sonya"

May 9, 2017 12:40 GMT  ·  By

Linux Mint project leader Clement Lefebvre was happy to announce today the official availability of the Cinnamon 3.4 desktop environment for GNU/Linux distributions.

We've already informed our readers about the release of the Cinnamon 3.4 desktop environment last week when it was tagged on GitHub and made available for download, along with the full release notes, but we're expecting an official announcement from Clement Lefebvre, which came only today.

"I’m happy to make it official and to announce the release of Cinnamon 3.4," said Clement Lefebvre in today's announcement. "I’d like to thank all the developers and designers who worked not only on Cinnamon 3.4, but in the redesign of the Spices website and the maintenance of the Cinnamon Spices themselves."

Prominent features of Cinnamon 3.4 include desktop grid, support for mozjs38, support for more Wacom devices, wildcard support in file searches, a new list widget for Spices settings, a multi-process settings daemon, desktop actions in the panel launcher, and separate processes for desktop handling and file manager in Nemo.

Also worth mentioning is better support for the configuration of sensitivity and acceleration for mice, support for lightdm-settings in System Settings, support for manage-systemd-units, extra configuration options for the screensaver, as well as theming engine improvements for margins and the system tray area.

Middle-click and Ctrl key support were implemented in Nemo's navigation buttons for the Mozilla Firefox web browser to open new tabs, much simpler date formats are now used for the last-modified column in list-view, a cleaner session EXIT phase was implemented, and more info is being displayed in the Spices About dialogs.

Coming soon to a GNU/Linux distro near you

While the Cinnamon 3.4 desktop environment is being prepped for deployment to Linux Mint users as part of the upcoming Linux Mint 18.2 "Sonya" operating system later this summer, OS vendors and integrators can already prepare to compile and distribute the new packages on their stable software repositories.

In other words, you should expect to see the Cinnamon 3.4 packages land in the repositories of your favorite GNU/Linux distro in the coming days, or weeks. Cinnamon 3.4.0 is currently the latest version available to download and it comes as a replacement for Cinnamon 3.2.8, which probably many of you are using right now.