Cinnamon 3.8 Desktop Released With Performance Improvements, Various Modifications

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Cinnamon 3.8 Desktop Released With Performance Improvements, Various Modifications

Ahead of the upcoming Linux Mint 19 release that's re-based on Ubuntu 18.04 LTS as well as the upcoming Linux Mint Debian Edition 3 release based on Stretch, the Cinnamon 3.8 desktop environment is now officially available...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Cinnamon-3.8-Released

[torturedutopian]

Cinnamon is clearly a sane, clever DE that we really badly needed back in the terrible days of the early Gnome 3 and KDE 4. But I really have the feeling it lost its momentum years ago. That's a bit sad. The fact they still have to keep up with Gnome libs, without really mastering their inner cores, must slow them down quite a lot. It frequently gives the feeling they are "hacking" the code to fit their vision, but what about the long term ?

Well, don't take me wrong. I know many people who settled with it and are happy with it. And I really tried to (I was disappointed many times due to instability and the reasons I stated above -- but this could probably be said about most DEs). It's just yet another frustrating story of scattering/split efforts as far as I'm concerned.

Please, correct me if I'm wrong, I'll be happy to ! I'm stating an opinion that is mostly subjective (as a loooooong time user / distro/DE hopper)

[Dukenukemx]

I hope this time Cinnamon is more stable, cause man does it like to crash and burn. Especially Nemo, which closes so often.

[torturedutopian]

Dukenukemx : this is one of the reasons I gave it up about 5 years ago. Sad to hear that's still the case :-/

[ngraham]

Cinnamon is clearly a sane, clever DE that we really badly needed back in the terrible days of the early Gnome 3 and KDE 4. But I really have the feeling it lost its momentum years ago. That's a bit sad. The fact they still have to keep up with Gnome libs, without really mastering their inner cores, must slow them down quite a lot. It frequently gives the feeling they are "hacking" the code to fit their vision, but what about the long term ?

Well, don't take me wrong. I know many people who settled with it and are happy with it. And I really tried to (I was disappointed many times due to instability and the reasons I stated above -- but this could probably be said about most DEs). It's just yet another frustrating story of scattering/split efforts as far as I'm concerned.

Please, correct me if I'm wrong, I'll be happy to ! I'm stating an opinion that is mostly subjective (as a loooooong time user / distro/DE hopper)

I feel the same way. Got started with Linux Mint and Cinnamon back in 2012 when things looked dark for GNOME and KDE. It was a breath of fresh air! But since then, KDE has come roaring back and IMHO has regained the mantle of "premier traditional UX Linux desktop." The Linux Mint folks got a lot of early mileage out of making GNOME 3 more usable, but it seems like they've hit a technological wall that's been seriously hampering progress for years. By contrast, KDE's codebase is modern and flexible. After a few years of teething pains, KDE Plasma 5 is now improving at light speed.

[nomadewolf]

Cinnamon is clearly a sane, clever DE that we really badly needed back in the terrible days of the early Gnome 3 and KDE 4. But I really have the feeling it lost its momentum years ago. That's a bit sad. The fact they still have to keep up with Gnome libs, without really mastering their inner cores, must slow them down quite a lot. It frequently gives the feeling they are "hacking" the code to fit their vision, but what about the long term ?

Well, don't take me wrong. I know many people who settled with it and are happy with it. And I really tried to (I was disappointed many times due to instability and the reasons I stated above -- but this could probably be said about most DEs). It's just yet another frustrating story of scattering/split efforts as far as I'm concerned.

Please, correct me if I'm wrong, I'll be happy to ! I'm stating an opinion that is mostly subjective (as a loooooong time user / distro/DE hopper)

Humm...
In the early days, sure, it'd break a lot.
But recently? I use Mint 18.3 and don't remember experiencing a sinlge crash...
Perhaps it's jsut me.

[Danny3]

I hope they fixed the desktop freeze for people using nouveau.
Either way, this is too late for me, I already switched to KDE Plama on Kubuntu 18.04.
I love the performance and stability of KDE Plama.

[Holograph]

It rarely crashes for me using AMDGPU drivers on Arch (and also Gentoo though I blew that install away a couple months ago)... but it does like to idle with 20-30% use of one of the cores of my i5 4570S for zero apparent reason. Finally switched to XFCE. Don't like it as much visually but I got it to a point where it's good enough. Just need to figure out how to both have the Windows key (yes that is the proper name of it) work to open the whisker menu but also work with shortcuts like win+E. Right now I had to make a stupid script to start Krusader and then close whisker menu, because pressing win-E triggers both keyboard shortcuts since XFCE seems to be using the KeyDown event to process keyboard shortcuts (which, frankly, is really incredibly stupid of them). Don't feel like I should ever have to work around such a stupid problem and I'm not happy that the Windows key works so poorly on Linux still. One of the big advantages of the Gnome-based distros is that the Windows key functions as a Windows key.

Microsoft got that key added to keyboards, and that set the expectation of what the key should do. I don't care if KDE or XFCE developers think otherwise because they are wrong.

But at least they don't waste 20-30% of a CPU core for no damn reason.

With XFCE, I almost never see its processes using over 5%, and it idles with less CPU usage than that, even. I'm not sure I've ever seen an XFCE process go up to 30% even briefly (it probably does happen sometimes, but yes, briefly).

Also, when Cinnamon does crash on me (again, not actually very frequent), it usually loads back up fine and doesn't require a reboot or anything. Still annoys me but could be worse.

[leipero]

I loved Cinnamon, but to be honest, I've lost interest in it as soon as they started with Xapps and avoided CSD support, I'm quite sure it still performs better than Gnome-Shell, it is basically less complex Shell done in GTK, so it have to be good.

[M@GOid]

It rarely crashes for me using AMDGPU drivers on Arch (and also Gentoo though I blew that install away a couple months ago)... but it does like to idle with 20-30% use of one of the cores of my i5 4570S for zero apparent reason. Finally switched to XFCE. Don't like it as much visually but I got it to a point where it's good enough. Just need to figure out how to both have the Windows key (yes that is the proper name of it) work to open the whisker menu but also work with shortcuts like win+E. Right now I had to make a stupid script to start Krusader and then close whisker menu, because pressing win-E triggers both keyboard shortcuts since XFCE seems to be using the KeyDown event to process keyboard shortcuts (which, frankly, is really incredibly stupid of them). Don't feel like I should ever have to work around such a stupid problem and I'm not happy that the Windows key works so poorly on Linux still. One of the big advantages of the Gnome-based distros is that the Windows key functions as a Windows key.

Microsoft got that key added to keyboards, and that set the expectation of what the key should do. I don't care if KDE or XFCE developers think otherwise because they are wrong.

But at least they don't waste 20-30% of a CPU core for no damn reason.

With XFCE, I almost never see its processes using over 5%, and it idles with less CPU usage than that, even. I'm not sure I've ever seen an XFCE process go up to 30% even briefly (it probably does happen sometimes, but yes, briefly).

Also, when Cinnamon does crash on me (again, not actually very frequent), it usually loads back up fine and doesn't require a reboot or anything. Still annoys me but could be worse.

Meta (my preferred name :-P) works fine in KDE5 for some time now. I also use it to start programs, because to drag a pointer all the way on the screen just to open a program is too slow :-)