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I love the way Plasma handles multiple desktops every other desktop environment leaves a lot to be desired. Multiple monitor supportĪs a user of multiple monitors, the experience with different desktops on Linux distros is mixed. The advantage of using ‘Esc’ instead of ‘Backspace’, which terminates the session, is that users don’t lose current work because only Cinnamon is restarted and not the whole session. In case of system freeze, users can use the keyboard shortcut ‘Ctrl+Alt+Esc’ which restarts the file manager Nemo and Settings Demon. The desktop now uses a newer ‘cogl’ API which addresses this problem. There were widespread reports of Cinnamon desktops freezing and this release brings a fix for it. Linux Mint 17.2 comes with Cinnamon 2.6 which was released in June. Un-necessary calculations in the window management part of Cinnamon could also be dropped, leading to reduced idle CPU usage (about 40% reduction in the number of CPU wakes per second).” Fix Freeze We found out tiny features such as generating thumbnails for “recent” files in the application menu were very expensive in resources and dropping them led to significant reductions in CPU usage. The docinfo part of Cinnamon, which handles “recent files”, was optimized a lot.
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Linux Mint teams invested time in reviewing the CPU usage of Cinnamon and then optimized it.Ĭlement Lefebvre, the lead developer of Linux Mint, gave an example on the official blog: “The menu, for instance, is refreshed about 6 times as less as before… signals resulting from connecting a USB device are grouped together and lead to 1 action, reducing 4 concurrent reactions into a single one. This efficiency is the result of work done by the Mint developers. However, I did notice significant improvement on my less powerful machines. My main system is a powerful machine with the latest i7 4790K CPU, 32GB of RAM and an SSD for the OS, so there was really nothing which would tell me if Linux Mint 17.2 was faster. I could see visual improvement in almost every area without the frustration of ‘where has that option gone?’ It’s faster and more efficient And Linux Mint is doing a commendable job at it. I call it the ‘ don’t break, what’s fixed’ approach. I didn’t have to worry about re-learning new things from the previous release because developers keep changing things. The experience was pleasant because not much had changed, despite the obvious progress. When I booted into Linux Mint, I could feel a refreshed, polished and modern OS – which still offered the time tested WIMP (windows, icons, mouse, pointer) paradigm. Since the Mint team has created many of its own forks and projects such as Cinnamon this frees the developers to invest their energies into their own projects.Īnd we are starting to see the results. With the ‘ stabilized’ base, they can focus on improving the core Linux Mint experience itself. To address this problem, the Linux Mint team decided to stick to the LTS versions of Ubuntu, which means the team doesn’t have to track a moving target and keep patching things. That makes it very hard for a derivative like Linux Mint to focus of the core element of its own OS, as most resources are wasted on keeping up with the moving target. These get tested in the non-LTS versions. Canonical is trying way too many things lately – convergence, Unity 8, Mir, Snappy, etc. Let’s face it: anything between the LTS versions of Ubuntu is a constantly moving target.
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I did try Linux Mint Cinnamon in its earlier days but Cinnamon back then was a bit buggy and lacked many features that I could enjoy in Plasma or KDE 4 which had matured by then. Personally, I was also affected by it because I was a Gnome user before Unity happened and then I started to look for an alternative and found Plasma. Linux Mint offered refuge to the disgruntled users of Gnome 3/Unity and as a result it grew immensely popular among such users. Mint has become one of the most popular Linux distributions in recent years, which I attribute to two factors: its focus on what users need and the Gnome 3/Unity debacle. I found a refreshed, faster and more feature-rich distro that’s well worth trying. Linux Mint 17.2 “Rafaela” Cinnamon was recently launched and, as usual, I installed it on my machines to see how this distro is progressing.