Hello everyone!
I’m proud to announce the beta release of Ubuntu Cinnamon 22.10 ‘Kinetic Kudu’. I’m really excited for this, as a lot of new fixes have been introduced into Cinnamon, and a new great release is coming soon!
Release Notes
Muffin recently got a rebase, which impacts a lot of things – they will be covered.
Cinnamon Desktop
- Cinnamon 5.4.12
- Adaptations to muffin rebase
- Resize popup for terminals
- Updates to confirmation dialogs
- Hotcorner settings simplified
- Fractional scaling, calendar, applet fixes
- Fix keybindings
- System info can now be copied to the clipboard in settings
- Window list/GWL fixes
- Icon updates
- The timezone settings no longer crash when the timezone is set to ‘Universal’
- Power applet now ‘steps up/down’ when scrolling to select a brightness value
- Dead code fixes, including the new defunct uses of libsoup2 (packages/dependencies are now migrating to libsoup3, such as libtimezonemap)
- libsoup is a HTTP client library for GNOME. An application cannot link against the older version libsoup2 and the latest libsoup3, so applications/libraries have to port to libsoup3 or drop support entirely.
- Cinnamon did have some code referring to libsoup but was not used, and so could be safely removed.
- However, some libraries still use libsoup2, and those will continue to be patched/worked through.
- cinnamon-control-center 5.4.7
- Muffin rebase adaptations
- Some quality of life improvements with the display panel (like checking monitor capabilities when deciding what scales to offer)
- cinnamon-desktop libraries 5.4.2
- Muffin rebase adaptations
- Added stream monitor functionality in volume control library (libcvc)
- cinnamon-menus, cinnamon-session 5.4.0 – no new changes
- cinnamon-screensaver 5.4.4
- General performance/library/code improvements
- cinnamon-settings-daemon 5.4.5
- Muffin rebase adaptations
- Obsolete plugins removed – a11y-keyboard, cursor, mouse, xrandr (now built into muffin and other cinnamon components)
- The datetime plugin now uses Gio’s dbus implementation – in other words, updated libraries. This should also result in better consistency with the date and time across other Gtk+ apps.
- Other performance updates
- cjs 5.4.1
- Cinnamon’s JS interpreter is now based off of GNOME’s JS interpreter (gjs) version 1.70.0.
- Muffin 5.4.7
- Muffin got a rebase of almost the entire code. So let’s briefly discuss what this means.
- Muffin is the window manager for Cinnamon. A lot of Cinnamon’s daemons, applications, and services work with it (for things like monitor rendering, handling drivers/monitors, etc.)
- For technical details, read the pull request: https://github.com/linuxmint/muffin/pull/601
- Quoting Clement Lefebvre, here are the changes that will be taken away and are not going to come back:
- “Window snapping (most people don’t even know it’s there or what the difference with tiling is)”
- “Configurable window animations (no real need, if we need to bring it back, we can simplify it greatly)”
- “Configurable vsync method (extremely niche)”
- “Tile detection for prefixing window titles in alt-tab and window list (not important)”
- A few other features were in muffin, but the rebase has removed them and now they are sitting in other components like cinnamon-control-center and cinnamon-settings-daemon.
- The pros to this besides a cleaner codebase include Gtk borders for all windows, and possibly partial Wayland support.
- Personally, I did not help with the rebase as I know nothing with how X or Wayland, so if you want to know more information I again strongly suggest reading more about the PR linked above.
- Other than that, muffin updates have included a lot of performance and stability fixes.
- Nemo 5.4.3
- Crash fixes
- Exfat renaming support introduced
- Epub search helper added
- xapp 2.2.15
- Some more code improvements
Updates related to Ubuntu 22.10
- Linux Kernel 5.19
- Firefox 104
- LibreOffice 7.4
- Thunderbird 104
- BlueZ 5.65
- CUPS 2.4
- NetworkManager 1.40
- Mesa 22
- Pipewire 0.3.57
- Poppler 22.08
- PulseAudio 16
- xdg-desktop-portal 1.15
Other Ubuntu Cinnamon Notes
- Our packages are now part of the main Ubuntu archives! This means that there is no longer a need to use our PPA.
- This also means when you upgrade Ubuntu (sudo do-release-upgrade) you will not need to re-add the PPA. This will simplify the upgrade process, and has many other advantages bringing us closer to flavor status.
Please ensure to check the other Ubuntu flavor release notes and test their builds aswell!
Thanks,
-Josh