The Cinnamon desktop environment, which powers the popular Linux Mint distribution, has released version 6.0 with some exciting new features. The most notable one is the experimental support for the Wayland display protocol, which promises better performance and security than the traditional X11 protocol.
Wayland support has been in development for a long time, and it is finally available for testing in Cinnamon 6.0. Users who want to try it out can choose the “Cinnamon on Wayland” session from the login screen, starting with Linux Mint 21.3, which is expected to be released later this year. However, the developers warn that the Wayland session is not as stable or feature-complete as the default X11 session, and it may have some limitations or bugs.
One of the benefits of Wayland is that it allows for fractional scaling, which can improve the display quality on high-resolution monitors. Cinnamon 6.0 has added experimental support for this feature, as well as for AVIF images, which are a new format that offers better compression and quality than JPEG or PNG images.
Other improvements in Cinnamon 6.0 include fixes for the power applet battery status, enhancements for the X11 session, a new option for the notification screen, and a color picker feature for the screenshot tool. You can find more details about the changes in the official changelog.
Cinnamon 6.0 is a major update for the desktop environment, and it shows that the developers are working hard to keep up with the latest technologies and trends in the Linux world. However, they are also taking a cautious approach to ensure that the transition to Wayland is smooth and seamless for the users. They do not plan to make Wayland the default session until 2026, when Linux Mint 23.x series will be released.
If you are curious about Cinnamon 6.0 and want to give it a try, you can download the source code from the GitHub repository and compile it yourself. Alternatively, you can wait for Linux Mint 21.3, which will include Cinnamon 6.0 as one of its desktop options. Either way, you can expect a great user experience and a lot of customization options from Cinnamon, which is one of the reasons why Linux Mint is so popular among Linux users.