A polished and revamped desktop experience arrives with Cinnamon 6.4 desktop.
For months, the Linux Mint team has been steadily improving their flagship – Cinnamon 6.4, a desktop environment update that’s not just incremental, but transformative.
This release isn’t just a collection of tweaks; it’s a refined experience designed to boost productivity and enhance visual appeal.
Let’s do a quick rundown of the key features of this release.
Cinnamon 6.4: Best features
First impressions count, and Cinnamon 6.4 delivers a striking visual overhaul. A new, sophisticated design theme dominates, incorporating darker hues, sharper contrasts, and elegantly rounded interface elements.
The new rounded interface marries the GNOME 2 looks with the new GNOME Shell looks. This brings the rounded corner looks in most of the elements.
In addition, the increased spacing between applets and the panel creates a cleaner, less cluttered workspace, a welcome change nonetheless. This isn’t just about aesthetics; it significantly improves readability and reduces visual fatigue.
Think of it as a minimalist makeover for your desktop, maximizing both style and functionality.
But, personally, I feel: the rounded corners and the GNOME 2 looks doesn’t look good together. It took away the essence of the Cinnamon desktop.
That said, the visual enhancements extend beyond the overall theme. The calendar applet, for instance, receives a stylish update, mirroring the overall design principle. Dialog boxes, often overlooked yet crucial for user interaction, have been completely redesigned. Now featuring colored buttons, they are both more visually appealing and intuitively navigable. Crucially, key pop-up dialogs now leverage the power of the Clutter library, ensuring smooth and responsive performance, even under pressure. Even the dreaded “application not responding” dialog gets a facelift, making a frustrating situation slightly less painful.
Beyond the visual polish, Cinnamon 6.4 introduces practical improvements that enhance daily workflow by migrating dialogs to Clutter (which is on maintenance mode anyway). The on-screen display (OSD) indicators, those fleeting messages that appear when adjusting volume or switching virtual desktops, have been modernized, ensuring they are both informative and unobtrusive.
And for those who work late into the night, the integrated “Night Light” mode is a game-changer. By intelligently adjusting the screen’s color temperature based on the time of day, it significantly reduces blue light exposure, lessening eye strain and promoting better sleep.
Notification management also sees a significant boost. Redesigned notification dialogs feature reduced horizontal button spacing for improved ergonomics. Furthermore, you now have the option to display notifications even in full-screen mode, ensuring you never miss an important alert, regardless of what you’re doing.
The Alt-Tab task switching, a cornerstone of desktop productivity, also receives considerable attention. The ability to display only windows on the current monitor significantly streamlines multitasking across multiple displays. Improvements to minimized window handling further refine this essential functionality.
The meticulous attention to detail continues with the main menu. Updated styling and increased indents enhance readability, while added support for numeric keypad navigation provides a new level of accessibility. The simplification of menu animations ensures a smoother, less distracting experience. Even the seemingly minor addition of improved JPEG-XL image previews demonstrates the focus of the team towards user experience. These seemingly small changes significantly improve workflow.
Rounding out the feature set, Cinnamon 6.4 introduces a new status bar applet, offering enhanced system monitoring capabilities. A new password entry widget improves security and user experience, while the power module now boasts power consumption profiles, managed via a new DBus interface – a welcome addition for power-conscious users. The optional ability to install Wayland session files further expands compatibility and future-proofs the desktop environment.
Download & Availability
This version will be available in the next Linux Mint 22 point release in 2025. Meanwhile, you can get this version’s source code from the GitHub. Alternatively, you can also try this in Arch Linux.
Wrapping up
In conclusion, Cinnamon 6.4 is well-designed by following the modern trends by brining key visual elements from GNOME. While that may not look well for a few, but it is a much-needed visual overhaul for the Cinnamon desktop for the future. Mostly to shed the “legacy” look while staying with the same performance. The result is a desktop that’s both beautiful and highly functional.
