The Linux Mint developers are not only working on the next iteration of the operating system, they are also trying to improve upon the Cinnamon desktop environment, which is also built by them.

The Linux Mint Cinnamon edition is the most used flavor for this distro, although the MATE follows close behind. The fact that the Linux Mint team is also making the desktop environment means that users will probably get the best integration of this software stack into an operating system. On the other hand, Cinnamon is open source and anyone can use it, but people usually choose Linux Mint for it.

It's also easy to understand why the developers are updating it all the time. In fact, they are pushing quite a lot of upgrades, but regular users don't usually get to experience them because many of the changes are made under the hood. The previous 2.4 branch was an impressive one, but the devs are already pulling patches for the 2.5 branch and they are looking for features to add to the 2.6 branch as well, like systemd support, for example.

Cinnamon has a very interesting future

The Cinnamon developers are trying to improve upon the desktop environment all the time and the changes they made have already landed in Linux Mint 17.1. It's easy to imagine that all the improvements that will be made in the coming months will also land pretty fast in the operating system as well.

"Cinnamon in particular is built without systemd support by default and the development team is planning to change this in version 2.6 to give the DE the ability to switch at runtime between systemd and consolekit/upower without the need to recompile anything. Everything we implemented has been delivered and a new development cycle is starting. After a quick maintenance release on selected projects (muffin, cinnamon, cinnamon-desktop, nemo) we're ready to switch our Cinnamon labels to 2.5.x, to merge pull requests, to talk about big ideas and to decide what we want to achieve in the next 6 month," noted Clement Lefebvre in a monthly update.

For now, you can either test Linux Mint 17.1 Cinnamon to see all the improvements or you can download Cinnamon right now from Softpedia.