There are plenty of reasons why Cinnamon is a fantastic Linux desktop environment, and the Linux community loves Linux Mint in-part thanks to it.
The user experience on offer and the various ways to customize Cinnamon Desktop is what attracts users to it.
Now, the upgrade to the desktop environment, Cinnamon 6.0 is here. So, let's take a look at it.
Cinnamon 6.0: What to Expect? 🤔
Right away, the major highlight of Cinnamon 6.0 has been the implementation of Wayland. This was in the works for quite some time, and it is here as an experimental support.
Starting with Linux Mint 21.3, you can switch to Wayland session from the login screen.
Alongside the usual niceties one might expect from Wayland, there seems to be experimental support for fractional scaling, which was made evident from the 'Add scale-monitor-framebuffer' commit for this release.
Though, the developers have clarified that Wayland is not replacing X11 on Cinnamon — yet; as their implementation of Wayland has its limitations, and even lacks a few features.
But, this is a starting point, and the devs expect Wayland support to be completely ready before 2026, that would be around the time Linux Mint 23.x is expected to go out.
Moving on, there are other changes with this release too!
Such as the fix to the power applet battery status, improvements for X11, support for AVIF images, new option for the notification screen, color picker support for the screenshot tool and more.
You may go through the changelog to learn more about the technical improvements coming with Cinnamon 6.0. We shall link the release announcement here as soon as it is live.
It is quite interesting to see that many Linux distributions; take for instance elementary OS, are working on transitioning to Wayland by default.
But, the developers of Cinnamon are taking a rather calculated approach to ensure that their Wayland implementation is completely ready before they switch to it by default on Cinnamon.
Suggested Read 📖
Sourav Rudra
📥 Get Cinnamon 6.0
Well, if you were looking to run it with Linux Mint, you will have to wait until later this year, when Linux Mint 21.3 “Virginia” releases, featuring Cinnamon 6.
For those of you who can't wait, you may download the source tarball from the official GitHub repo, and set it up manually.
💬 Are you excited about what Cinnamon 6 has to offer?
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