The Linux Mint team has announced the release of Cinnamon 6.6, which will serve as the default desktop environment in the anticipated Linux Mint 22.3 (Zena) release, expected between late December 2025 and early 2026.
One of the most significant enhancements in Cinnamon 6.6 is the redesigned application menu applet, which introduces the option to toggle between symbolic or full color icons for categories. Other features include support for color system buttons on hover, configurable Places and Bookmarks, along with numerous visual updates.
Additionally, keyboard handling and the virtual keyboard have been modernized, which now include a new button for switching layouts, a shortcut in the context menu for accessing Keyboard Accessibility settings, improved theme support, and a fade-in/out effect for hiding and showing the keyboard.
The Settings app has also been improved, introducing a new Thunderbolt module, an additional tab for tiling in the Windows module, a suspend option for battery-critical actions in the Power module, and support for a new System Information tool.
The Sound applet has been updated to resolve an issue with album artwork not reappearing after changing the volume. Furthermore, the NetworkManager applet now displays multiple active VPN connections, and the Workspace Switcher applet includes an option to exhibit window icons.
Other noteworthy enhancements in Cinnamon 6.6 encompass new keyboard shortcuts, improvements to the notifications applet for displaying the newest notifications first, and the ability to use hot corners in full-screen mode.
Cinnamon 6.6 also introduces several backend changes, including a shift to XApp symbolic icons and an IBus runtime dependency, improving variable names for NetworkManager options during builds, and allowing the build of Cinnamon without any NetworkManager requirements.
While it will be the default desktop for Linux Mint 22.3 (Zena), users can also install Cinnamon 6.6 on other GNU/Linux distributions that offer the most recent Cinnamon release, such as Arch Linux, from their stable software repositories.
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