Linux Mint project Clement Lefebvre revealed today in the
monthly newsletter some of the new features and improvements coming to the next major version of the Cinnamon desktop environment, version 6.8, such as full Wayland support.
The Linux Mint devs have been working hard on making Cinnamon’s Wayland session as stable as possible, and it looks like
Cinnamon 6.8 will finally remove the “experimental” status of the Wayland session and fully support Wayland. Here are some of the features they’ve implemented so far:
Some of the Wayland improvements and features they managed to implement include proper mapping (sizing and positioning) for new windows, applet popup menus and context menus, proper focus stealing prevention, and improved support for multiple monitors and KVM switches.
There’s also full HiDPI support for crisp icons, smoother mouse cursor, and better handling of Chromium apps, as well as support for running root apps as Wayland clients, window progress to see, for example, Firefox download progress in the panel app button.
On top of that, the devs fixed multiple Wayland crash scenarios and significantly improved hardware acceleration throughout the compositor, desktop session, and both Wayland and Xwayland clients.
In addition to these Wayland improvements, Cinnamon 6.8 will feature a cinnamon-list-windows command to make it easy to list all open windows and to quickly see their position, size, HiDPI, app, and backend info, as well as support for systemd’s graphical-session to boost compatibility with many upstream projects.
Cinnamon’s Muffin window and composite manager also received some improvements, such as the ability to round coordinates and dimensions for all Clutter actors. According to the devs, this guarantees crisp and precise rendering and also fixes blur issues when applets or desktop components forget to do so themselves.
Cinnamon 6.8 will be the default desktop environment of
Linux Mint 23, which will be released later this year. Linux Mint 23 will also feature improved SSH keyring support, LightDM configuration improvements, and fingerprint authentication improvements in Slick Greeter.
9to5linux.com
