The team behind Linux Mint unveiled its latest update this week—Mint 17 using kernel 3.13.0-24, nicknamed "Qiana." The new release indicates a major change in direction for what has quickly become one of the most popular Linux distros available today. Mint 17 is based on Ubuntu 14.04, and this decision appears to have one major driver. Consistency.

Like the recently released Ubuntu 14.04, Mint 17 is a Long Term Support Release. That means users can expect support to continue until 2019. But even better, this release marks a change in Mint's relationship with Ubuntu. Starting with Mint 17 and continuing until 2016, every release of Linux Mint will be built on the same package base—Ubuntu 14.04 LTS. With this stability, instead of working to keep up with whatever changes Ubuntu makes in the next two years, Mint can focus on those things that make it Mint.

With major changes on the way for Ubuntu in the next two years, Mint's decision makes a lot of sense. Not only does it free up the Mint team to focus on its two homegrown desktops (Cinnamon and MATE), but it also spares Mint users the potential bumpy road that is Ubuntu's future.

In other words, Mint can sit back and work on perfecting its desktop while Ubuntu stumbles through the Mir and Unity 8 transitions. When things have settled down in Ubuntuland, Mint can jump back in with both feet (assuming it still wants to) when Ubuntu 16.04 LTS arrives. If all goes the way Mint developers intend, these changes will give Mint users a more polished, stable distro.

All of this makes Mint 17 an important release—it's essentially what Mint will be working with for the next two years. Luckily, after spending some time with it, the good news is that Mint 17 will make a great base on which to build.

Linux Mint 17 Cinnamon

As with all Mint releases, there are two separate downloads available, one for the Cinnamon desktop and one for the MATE desktop. The more interesting of the two Mint 17 releases is the Cinnamon flavor, which features the just-released Cinnamon 2.2.

The Cinnamon desktop is a curious hybrid, combining some of the best elements of KDE with the best elements of the now-abandoned GNOME 2.x line. Cinnamon also has more than a few tricks of its own that build on those earlier foundations. It sounds like a recipe for a terrible Frankenstein of a desktop, but fortunately that's not the case. Cinnamon ends up being perhaps the most user-friendly and all-around useful desktop available on any platform.

Now, Cinnamon has problems, but fortunately 2.2 solves many of the worst. It's much faster and much more stable than previous releases. In fact, if you tried out Cinnamon even just a few releases ago and dismissed it as slow and buggy (can't say we blame you; it was), we highly suggest you give it another try in Mint 17.

Among the more noticeable changes in Cinnamon 2.2 is the revamped system settings panel, which is no longer divided up into the somewhat arbitrary sections "normal" and "advanced." Here there are just settings. The various settings panels are all in one place and have been reorganized into some basic categories that make it easy to find what you're looking for, while also allowing you to change it.

In fact, given that the new settings app is easy to use, and it's simple to jump between settings, we'd like to see a way to remove all the individual settings that clutter up the main Cinnamon menu and just have a single "settings" button that opens the app. For now, that does not appear to be possible.

Buried away in the revamped settings panel is one of the most appealing new Cinnamon features—the ability to shade or fade windows with the mouse wheel. To turn this on, head to Settings and click the Windows option. This will bring up a panel with all the options for controlling window behavior. Click the option to set "Action on title bar with mouse scroll" and switch it to whichever option you prefer. Now whenever you want to see what's behind your currently active window, you can just scroll the mouse wheel (or scroll on your trackpad) and the foremost window will fade out (or shade up).

This makes it much easier to refer, for example, to something in the Web browser while you're working in a word processor or text editor. You don't need to switch apps, which can break your concentration and rhythm, when all you want to do is double-check a fact.

It's not an earth-shattering feature—in fact, buried as it is, many users will likely never know it exists—but it's one of many handy little extras that together add up to give Cinnamon a level of polish and user control that sets it above other desktops.

Two other notable tweaks to the various settings panels include some changes to Cinnamon's Hot Corners and HUD features. The HUD, which is there to let you know that you are snapping a window to the edge of the screen, only appears when you get really close to the edge. It's less sensitive, which means it's harder to trigger it accidentally. The Hot Corners feature now has options to trigger events on hover, a click, or both.

Cinnamon 2.2 also adds support for HiDPI screens. We tested this in a virtual machine running on a Retina Macbook Pro and found that, while Cinnamon mostly looks just fine on a HiDPI screen, font rendering, in particular, isn't all that great. The same can be said of most Linux distros, though, HiDPI support or not. One solution is to use Infinality, which makes it relatively easy to tweak the font rendering to your liking.

Nemo, the default Cinnamon file manager, gets a couple new features in this release, including a new Recent Places sidebar item and a new tab switching keyboard shortcut. Control-+ and control-shift-+ will cycle through your open tabs.

The main Cinnamon menu resembles what you'd find in KDE or Windows 7, but it looks a bit prettier, thanks to some nice icons. Cinnamon 2.2 adds a new option to remove applications right from the menu, which can make the process of uninstalling unneeded apps a little easier. Right click an item in the menu, and you'll see a new option to "uninstall."

To go along with the uninstall, the Cinnamon menu now highlights newly installed applications, or at least the release notes say it will. During testing, we never noticed anything after installing a new application.

There are a few other minor changes in Cinnamon 2.2, including some bug fixes that make it work better alongside GNOME 3.x on the same machine. You should no longer see GNOME Control Center in Cinnamon, or Cinnamon Settings in GNOME, making it easier to take Cinnamon for a spin without necessarily switching to Mint 17. Along those lines, it's worth noting that the old Cinnamon PPA for Ubuntu is no longer being maintained. But given the increasing popularity of Cinnamon, it seems inevitable that a new one will pop up eventually.