Cinnamon has come a long way in terms of both usability and responsiveness, and Mint 17 ‘Qiana’ stands proof of this. As mentioned in my review of Mint 17 KDE edition, this release will be supported for five years, and it will also be the base for development of future Mint releases.
Mint 17 ‘Qiana’ uses the Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty base and features Cinnamon 2.2, Linux Kernel 3.13.0 and the MDM 1.6 login manager.
Let’s proceed and see how Cinnamon looks like.
The Cinnamon menu:
When right-clicking a menu entry, a new option to uninstall the selected application is now present:
Mint 17 ‘Qiana’ features a beautiful set of wallpapers:
System Settings has a new interface, removing the advanced or normal modes and offering all the categories at once:
In this release, HexChat replaced XChat as the default IRC client. HexChat is a fork of XChat, actively developed, which brings a few more features. For web browsing there is Firefox, and Thunderbird is the default email client. Transmission is the BitTorrent client and Pidgin can be used for various IM protocols.
HexChat provides graphical access to several configuration options that were available in XChat only as commands:
The default file manager in Cinnamon is Nemo, which closely resembles Nautilus from GNOME.
The bottom panel contains the panel, a quick launcher for applications, the taskbar, the clock and window list applets, as well as the system tray. The applets include the clock, a window list, notifications applet, networking and volume applets, and also the user applet.
The user applet provides quick access to system settings, power off or log off options, and also the possibility to enable or disable on-screen notifications:
Adding applets to the panel – Cinnamon makes it easy to install online applets as well:
Another feature for beautifying the desktop is the possibility to add the so-called “desklets”, which can be snapped to a grid and offer the possibility to enable or disable showing their border and title. Desklets include calculators, clocks, comic strips and more:
Other notable features in Cinnamon 2.2 include window manager improvements, for example window opacity or shadows improvements; HiDPI support; HUD changes and hot corners improvements.
