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Cinnamon 4.8
The latest version of Cinnamon features better performance, including a 5% rendering improvement at 4K and lower use in its window management and a faster Javascript interpreter based on MozJS78.
Support for spices is also improved thanks to automatic forward compatibility with newer releases of Cinnamon, automatic multi-versioning and better network handling.
Search results in the application menu are now sorted by relevance.
Support was added for Systemd's "suspend-then-hibernate" mechanism.
Other improvements include:
Better Flatpak support
Percentage in the sound volume OSD
The option to always show the panel when the menu is open
Scrolling in the window-quick-list applet
Configurable scrolling direction in the workspace-switcher-applet
The ability to assign a keybinding to mute the microphone
Zstd support in nemo-fileroller
Tiff support and PDF page numbers in nemo-media-columns
Thumbnails for files up to 64GB in nemo
Printing and Scanning improvements
In Linux Mint 19.3 (and Ubuntu 18.04) and prior releases printers and scanners relied on the availability of drivers (whether these were included in the Linux kernel or added manually).
In Linux Mint 20 (and Ubuntu 20.04), the distribution shipped with ippusbxd, an implementation of IPP over USB. Thanks to IPP, also referred to as driverless printing/scanning, devices can be detected and used without the need for any drivers and in a standard way. Unfortunately the presence of IPP over USB also means drivers are bypassed and inhibited. Ippusbxd turned out to be a disappointment and created more problems than it solved.
In Linux Mint 20.1 ippusbxd was removed so printing and scanning work the same way as in Linux Mint 19.x and prior releases.
HPLIP was upgraded to version 3.20.11 to bring the latest support for HP printers and scanner.
Documentation sections were added to the Linux Mint User Guide for IPP-USB and Sane-Airscan, two very new yet promising projects which might be included by default in future releases.
Both ipp-usb and sane-airscan are available in the Linux Mint 20.1 repositories. Try them out if you can't get your printer or scanner to work with software drivers.
XApps improvements
The clock format in Slick Greeter (the login screen) is now configurable.
Xed can now automatically close brackets when it's used to edit source code.
In Xviewer, the behaviors of the primary and secondary (tilt) mouse wheels are now configurable.
Pix is now able to filter by rating.
Other improvements
Hardware video acceleration is now enabled by default in Celluloid. On most computers this results in smoother playback, better performance and reduced CPU usage.
The driver manager was migrated to PackageKit. It features a stronger resolution of package dependencies and its user interface was improved.
Some projects such as mintsystem and mintdrivers are now backported to earlier releases and contain their own translations.
Chromium was added to the repository.
More projects were ported to the Meson build system: cinnamon-control-center, cinnamon-settings-daemon, nemo-extensions.
The upload manager, mintupload, features better a looking user interface and a better drop zone.
System improvements
Linux Mint 20.1 features a unified filesystem layout.
This release ships with linux-firmware 1.187 and the Linux kernel 5.4.
Main components
Linux Mint 20.1 features Cinnamon 4.8, a Linux kernel 5.4 and an Ubuntu 20.04 package base.
LTS strategy
Linux Mint 20.1 will receive security updates until 2025.
Until 2022, future versions of Linux Mint will use the same package base as Linux Mint 20.1, making it trivial for people to upgrade.
Until 2022, the development team won't start working on a new base and will be fully focused on this one.
