Cinnamon 1.8 released

On behalf of the team and all the developers who contributed to this build, I am proud to announce the release of Cinnamon 1.8!
Cinnamon 1.8 represents 7 months of development and 1,075 commits. It features a lot of bug fixes but also brand new features and many improvements.
Here’s a quick overview of some of the new things in Cinnamon 1.8.
Have a lot of fun with this new release and don’t hesitate to give us some feedback! Enjoy

File Manager

Nemo received a lot of attention. Its user interface was heavily modified and its behavior was adapted to integrate better with Cinnamon.

You can now easily hide the sidebar and switch back and forth between places and treeview. Under each place, if applicable, a small bar indicates how much space is used.

Screensaver

Cinnamon now features its own screensaver. One of its particularities is that you can define an away message before locking up your screen.

People who are looking for you can see that message while you’re away.

Control Center

All configuration modules are now present in Cinnamon Settings. You no longer need to use Gnome Control Center.

Desklets

KDE calls them Plasmoids, Android calls them Widgets, in Cinnamon they’re called “Desklets”. The same way you can add applets to your panel, you can add desklets to your desktop.

Cinnamon 1.8 ships with 3 desklets installed by default (a launcher, a clock and a photoframe) and many more will come from the community (yes, before people ask, there is an xkcd desklet out there).

Spices Management

In Cinnamon 1.8 you can install “spices” (i.e. applets, desklets, themes, extensions) straight from your desktop. You don’t need to browse http://cinnamon.linuxmint.com anymore.

You can apply updates as well and if the Spice supports it you can use multiple instances of it.

New features for developers

Settings API for Applets/Desklets
If you’re an Applet/Desklet developer, don’t use gsettings anymore. Cinnamon 1.8 features a settings API which will do all the work for you.

• It will set up your settings and default values for you, automatically.
• It will allow you to access your settings just as easily as you access values in an array.
• It will generate a configuration screen for you, automatically.

In other words, you just define your settings and use them in your applet/desklet, and Cinnamon does everything else for you. A configuration screen is automatically generated for you and the user can configure the settings you defined from the System Settings
For more details check the Sample Settings Example applet at: https://github.com/linuxmint/Cinnamon/tree/master/files/usr/share/cinnamon/applets/settings-example%40cinnamon.org
Nemo actions
By placing an action file in /usr/share/nemo/actions you can add items to Nemo’s right-click context menu.
For more details check the sample action provided with Nemo at https://github.com/linuxmint/nemo/blob/master/files/usr/share/nemo/actions/sample.nemo_action
Standalone Looking Glass
If you’re using Looking Glass a lot, you’d probably want a standalone version of it… well, there is one now
To launch it, run the following command: “cinnamon-looking-glass”.

System improvements

Renderer detection
Muffin now checks which renderer is being used. If the session is using a Software Renderer (that’s the case when there is a problem with the drivers or if the card doesn’t feature any acceleration) a notification pops up to let the user know about the problem.
Fallback mode
Cinnamon no longer uses gnome-session for fallback. In some cases gnome-session didn’t allow Cinnamon to run even though the hardware was capable of running Cinnamon. Another limitation of gnome-session was its inability to restart Cinnamon after a crash. In Cinnamon 1.8, the Cinnamon session always launches Cinnamon, so your computer will try to run Cinnamon no matter what.
Cinnamon also uses a wrapper to restart itself and recover from potential crashes. If Cinnamon crashes it now falls back on Metacity and asks the user if he/she wants to restart Cinnamon.

And that’s not all…

Cinnamon 1.8 is huge. Its commit changelog is twice the size of the 1.6 release!
Other notable features:

• Better hot-corner configuration
• Coverflow Alt-Tab
• Timeline Alt-Tab
• Horizontal/Vertical maximizing of windows

For an exhaustive list of changes, please visit the following page: https://github.com/linuxmint/Cinnamon/commits/master
If you have questions about changes which are not covered in this announcement please contact the development team on IRC at irc.spotchat.org #linuxmint-dev.

Notes to themes artists

Details will be posted shortly on how to update your theme for Cinnamon 1.8.
Note: With the exception of desklets, Cinnamon 1.8 should look fine in most 1.6 themes already.
Feel free to come and chat with us on #linuxmint-dev (irc.spotchat.org) if you face any problem.

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About The Author

Clement Lefebvre (aka "Clem") is the lead developer and founder of Cinnamon and Linux Mint. He's also involved in the MATE project as release manager.