Cinnamon 3.8 is now officially out. Here are some of the most notable highlights:

CJS, the Javascript interpreter, was rebased on GJS 1.50.2 and now depends on mozjs52

Support was added for elogind, systemd-timedated1 (which should replace ntp and ntpdate in Linux Mint 19 Cinnamon Edition), and the admin:// protocol

Support was improved for GTK 3.22, CSD windows (in particular for their button layout and titlebar click actions) and LibreOffice (in nemo-preview)

With the exception of Nemo extensions, all Python components were ported to Python3

The network settings were backported from GNOME 3.24 and include fixes from GNOME 3.26

The region settings now support the ability to show uncommon/exotic keyboard layouts

In the power settings, “Shutdown immediately” can now be chosen for closed lid and critical battery power events

Cinnamon now activates the touchpad if no other pointing devices are present

The screen is now locked synchronously prior to suspend

Suspend, Hibernate and Screen rotation keys are now supported when the screen is locked

Cinnamon no longer allows DE-specific or poorly written applications to start the GNOME or MATE screensavers when the Cinnamon screensaver is running

Cinnamon no longer sets QT environment variables (distributions are responsible for making QT5 applications look good out of the box)

Titlebar themes are now restricted to metacity-3

Nemo-rabbitvcs is no longer maintained by Cinnamon but by RabbitVCS

Thumbnails can now be rendered for files as large as 32GB

Scale/Overview can now be activated via dbus

Xlets can now define column options when using lists, settings with dependencies now use a revealer, dependencies can now be inverted and defined on sections (not just widgets). Simple expressions using boolean operators can be used to compare values. The settings example applet was updated to showcase all these new additions.

Performance was also improved:

Improvements in muffin and the window list make Cinnamon feel snappier and much faster than before at rendering new windows.

Improvements in libnemo-extension and the way views are rendered make Nemo faster at showing the content of directories.

Improvements ported from GNOME reduce the occurrence of full stage redraws.

Look and feel was improved:

Window animations were refined. They feel smoother and add to the feeling of snappiness.

Symbolic icons give Cinnamon a more modern look and better support for dark themes.

The coordinates and size of some widgets and components were adjusted to fall on exact pixels (which results in removing a slight blurriness and making them look crisp).

The quit dialog no longer skips the taskbar

And also:

The nemo search was simplified and is easier to use. It’s also synchronous and much faster than before.

Rubber-banding, which was previously only available in icon view, is now also available in list view.

You can now press <Super>+Alt (or use the right-click option on the Show Desktop applet) to quickly see your desklets, without minimizing your windows. When doing so, desklets move above your windows, until you click anywhere.

Notifications are smarter. They now have a close button (which unlike the notification itself doesn’t send you towards the source application) and no longer fade-out on mouse-over. To avoid notification spam, they’re also limited in number per source and disappear when the application is focused, except for particular applications (Firefox, Chromium..etc) which use multiple tabs and which can send notifications for various internal sources. Notifications can now also show at the bottom of the screen.

The maximum sound volume was currently set to 150%, with the sound settings allowing to go all the way to 150% while the sound applet and media keys only allowed a range of 0 to 100%. Cinnamon now lets you define what the maximum sound volume is, between 0 and 150%, and all sound controls (whether it’s the sound settings, the sound applet or the media keys) now range between 0 and the maximum value you defined. This allows you to quickly reach 150% without going into the sound settings, but also to quickly reach any arbitrary value, whatever suits your speakers and your environment, whether that value is higher than 100% for small speakers in loud environments or lower than 100% in quiet environments.

In the sound applet, the microphone and the speakers can now be muted separately. An option was added to choose whether or not to force the aspect-ratio of the album art. Tracks can be changed by scrolling left/right (that option is configurable).

This is just an overview. There’s a lot more than this and this new version of Cinnamon also capitalizes on 6 months of development, and features a ton of fixes and refinements.

We’d like to thank all the developers who worked on or contributed to Cinnamon 3.8: