Cinnamon 6.2 Desktop Released, Here’s What You Need to Know

As anticipation builds for the upcoming Linux Mint 22, the Mint team have released the latest version of their Cinnamon desktop environment with Cinnamon 6.2. This latest version brings a variety of refinements to the previous major release of Cinnamon. While it does offer some new features, this release feels more of a polishing and smoothing out release due to many incremental improvements and bug fixes as the main differences to the previous edition.

The most notable thing to address with this release is probably the new XApp, GNOME Online Accounts GTK, for setting up all your online accounts. GNOME’s Online Accounts app from GNOME 46 is based on the GTK 4 toolkit and there is a bit of controversy surrounding GTK4 and GNOME’s approach to making apps these days. The Linux Mint team have made many XApps over the past few years and this is a good addition to the XApps by offering Cinnamon users the option to integrate various online accounts with their desktop. Although I would like to suggest they consider a name change, calling the XApp “GNOME Online Accounts GTK” is not the most clear way to differentiate it from GNOME’s GTK based Online Accounts app.

The other refinements you’ll see in the latest version of the Cinnamon desktop is that Cinnamon sessions now have greeter badges, the search bar shows by default when adding to the Startup Applications, the Workspace Switcher supports removing workspace with middle click, and there are new screen lock delay options: 5 & 10 seconds. There have also been improvements to configuring keybindings or keyboard shortcuts because Cinnamon Spices now support configurable keybindings and you can now search in the keyboard shortcuts editor.

I’m sure many users are excited to get their hands on this latest version of the Cinnamon desktop but typically we see a release of the Cinnamon desktop about a month or so prior to the release of the next Linux Mint so users will still need to wait for Linux Mint 22 to give it a spin. Mint 22 is expected sometime this summer but I’ll wager a guess based on all the times I’ve covered releases for Linux Mint and Cinnamon. I’ll say that we are probably going to see Linux Mint 22 which will be based on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS around Mid-July. There is a lot more to talk about with Mint 22 because there will be many excited changes for that release like the new Kernel release cadence and more. Be sure to subscribe to get the latest news on Linux Mint 22.

What are your thoughts on Cinnamon 6.2? Are you looking forward to Linux Mint 22? Share your opinions in the comments.