‘Cpu load Cinnamon desktop drops thanks to update’

Developers released a new release of the Linux desktop environment Cinnamon on Tuesday. They claim that, thanks to improvements, version 2.6 can now reduce the number of CPU wakes per second by as much as 40 percent.

The Cinnamon desktop offers the look and feel of the old Gnome 2, but is based on the more modern Gnome 3. The developers say they have done a lot of work by studying and improving the CPU load. They found that Cinnamon sometimes repeated tasks unnecessarily, which turned out to require significant processor capacity. For example, the menu ultimately had to be refreshed six times less often to function properly. This and more optimizations eventually led to a decrease of about forty percent of the CPU wakes per second, the developers claim.

Furthermore, the developers have added a shortcut for when the Linux desktop crashes. From now on the environment can be restarted at any time with the key combination Ctrl+Alt+Escape. This does not automatically log the user out, which is the case with the well-known Ctrl+Alt+Backspace.

The devs have now also added support to Cinnamon for multiple monitors. They also introduce a screensaver program with version 2.6. Previously, the desktop environment did not have a standard way to display screensavers. With the Screen Locker program, XScreenSaver and HTML5 screensavers can now be displayed. New visual effects have also been added to Cinnamon and the energy applet can now be used to control the keyboard backlight.

Finally, the Nemo file manager got a new plugin manager. With that administrator, specific actions for the explorer can be enabled or disabled. Among other things, Cinnamon 2.6 is expected to come standard for the first time with the release of the popular Linux Mint 17.2 distro ‘Rafaela’. It will be released at the end of this month.