Linux Mint 16 is the result of 6 months of incremental development on top of stable and reliable technologies. This new release comes with updated software and brings refinements and new features to make your desktop even more comfortable to use.



Linux Mint 16 "Petra" Cinnamon Edition

Cinnamon 2.0

Cinnamon 2.0 represents 5 months of development and 856 commits from 28 developers. It features a lot of bug fixes but also brand new features and many improvements.

Sound Effects

Cinnamon is now able to play sounds when you perform common events such as closing windows, switching workspaces etc...



Sound effects bring life to Cinnamon and make using it more fun

These sounds are configurable, can be disabled globally or individually and you can set the volume for them independently of the main sound volume.

Better User Management

A new applet was introduced to let you easily perform session and account related tasks (leaving, switching users, disabling notifications, accessing settings...etc).



The User Applet makes it easier to perform common session and user tasks

You can also change your password, name and login picture easily from the new "Account Details" configuration screen.



In Account Details you can quickly change your full name, password and avatar

System administrators also have access to the new "Users and Groups" configuration tool which allows them to administrate users and groups.



System administrators can configure groups again

Better Edge-Tiling

Edge-Tiling is the action of quickly moving a window to the edge of the screen and sticking it there for it to occupy half of the screen. It can be done by dragging the window towards a screen edge or by pressing pressing “Super_L” (The Windows key) and an arrow key.



Windows can now be tiled to corners and resized

Edge-Tiling was already there in Cinnamon but it just got much better:

Tiled windows no longer need to occupy half of the screen, they do so by default when tiled but you can now resize them.

In addition to the Left, Right, Top and Bottom edge of the screen, you can now also tile into the 4 corners of the screen.

When you drag a window near a tiling zone Cinnamon shows that zone to you. This is called the HUD and its purpose it to bring awareness and make it easier for novice users to discover the Edge-Tiling and Edge-Snapping (explained in the next paragraph) features.

Edge-Snapping

Edge-Snapping is the most impressive feature in Cinnamon 2.0. It was inspired by the Snap functionality of Xbox One. It is similar to Edge-Tiling (the window sticks to the edge or corner of the screen, occupies half of the screen and can be resized) but with one key difference: Maximized windows do not cover snapped windows.



Snapping is the star of the show, almost as good as having multiple monitors. Here we're working on the code in a maximized window while enjoying some music videos.

The idea behind Edge-Snapping is to let you keep an eye on a particular window without letting that window get in the way of everything else you're doing. If you have multiple monitors you can already do that by moving that window to another monitor, if you don't you'll probably love this new feature.

To snap a window in Cinnamon 2.0, drag it with the mouse towards an edge or a corner while pressing the "Control" key. Alternatively you can snap a window using "Control", "Super_L" and an arrow key.

Nemo Improvements

Better MIME handling

MIME handling was drastically improved. Associating applications or commands to particular file types was a frustrating exercise. It is now a breeze.



It's now trivial to associate applications or commands to MIME types

System tray support for file operations

The File operations window appears when you move or copy files. It shows you the progress of current move or copy operations. Prior to Cinnamon 2.0, if you closed this window you couldn't bring it back.

In Cinnamon 2.0, if you close this window, it will show as an icon in your system tray. The icon uses a circular symbolic progress icon to give you an indication of the progress of the operations.



The File Operations window no longer disappears, it goes to your system tray

Other Nemo improvements

The overall performance and UI were greatly improved. Nemo looks better and acts faster than before.



Nemo received a lot of UI, usability and performance improvements

Bookmarks and devices now appear in the "Move to" and "Copy to" context menus so you can quickly move/copy files towards your favourite destinations.

New extensions were ported to Nemo, in particular nemo-media-columns and nemo-preview (which is forked from Sushi).

Other improvements

Cinnamon 2.0 also features many other improvements. For a complete overview of the new features in Cinnamon 2.0, please visit http://segfault.linuxmint.com/2013/10/cinnamon-2-0-released/

Login Screen

MDM 1.4 was designed to work perfectly with Linux Mint 16 and Cinnamon 2.0, not only to log in but also to let you switch between users easily.



The MDM configuration screen focused on important features and is far less intimidating than before

MDM received the following improvements: