Cinnamon 6.4 is out already ... ? But what about us loyal users?

[Omnimaxus]

Hi to everyone. I don't mean to stir the pot or anything like that, but imagine my surprise when I saw this.

Link: https://linuxiac.com/cinnamon-6-4-deskt ... -released/

I legitimately thought Cinnamon 6.4 would debut with Linux Mint 22.1. But apparently not. It's being released already. Matter of fact, the article says this: "But Arch users? Lucky you! You’ll probably see Cinnamon 6.4 land in the official repos any day now. Other rolling release distros are likely to follow soon after, so keep an eye out." What about us regular Linux Mint users? We've been waiting patiently for this to come out on our OS, and boom; the new look gets released for everyone else. I'm not upset or mad or anything infantile like that, but I will say that I'm surprised. The Linux Mint user in me wishes that this came out first for us, is all. We're the ones who support Linux Mint, advocate for it, and donate to the development team. It makes sense for the updated Cinnamon desktop environment to come "home" first, is all. Hope Clem and the team sees this post, and rethinks how they handle these sort of releases going forward. Thanks.

[Pjotr]

Why so eager to be the early bird that catches all the bugs and has to suffer all the teething troubles?

Personally, I'm quite happy to wait until the Mint dev team decides that the code is mature and stable enough for release in Mint. Until then: by all means let the rolling release cowboys have their "fun" with it. I have better things to do with my time than chasing bugs in immature code.

[Coggy]

The linked article seems to misunderstand the Mint naming/numbering. Looking here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux_Mint it seems that a given major version retains the same first letter through all sub-versions, e.g. Mint21.x all named with "v". I expect all Mint22.x to be named starting "W". The article does say to expect to wait until "Xara" which would presumably be 23.0. It does seem reasonable that they might choose not to try to drop a significant UI change into an LTS release, so 23.0 seems like a reasonable expectation to me. Looking at new version times, I expect this will be some time next summer (or next winter if you're down under). It's an uncomfortably long wait, but Mint not being released until it's ready is a Good Thing ™ and I'm happy to roll with that.

This is all guesswork, I have no inside knowledge of the matter. Still it's good to know that Cinnamon is still receiving care and attention.

[xenopeek]

While Cinnamon is a Linux Mint project there are developers/maintainers and users from other OSes contributing to its development.

A new Cinnamon version is released ('tagged') ahead of a next Linux Mint release because the software needs to be ready before you can release a new OS version with it. And Linux Mint translators may also need time to update translations for the new version. I saw Pjotr is already done with updating the Dutch translations

Development isn't done in "secret" but it's all public on https://github.com/linuxmint/cinnamon. So there's no keeping secret a Cinnamon version being tagged for a next Linux Mint release. That some website jumps the gun on announcing it, they always do that and you just have to ignore the click bait. And as Pjotr wrote that Arch Linux already has it packaged just means Arch Linux Cinnamon users get to find the first bugs, which will make Linux Mint 22.1 better with less bugs.

Linux Mint 22 isn't a rolling-release distro so yes you have to wait till you can upgrade to 22.1 (you can help make it better by joining in beta testing once the beta release is announced). LMDE 6 on the other hand is semi-rolling release and will get Cinnamon sooner. It's already packaged in the repository, just not pushed as update yet when I looked last.

[Pepi]

I'm happy with what I've got now. I'm sure a little eye candy would not be worth the trouble to debug

[Hoser Rob]

They seem to have put in a new Night Light (ie red shift) feature. That's not just eye candy if your eyes like that kind of thing. Or if your screen has a slight blue tinge like mine. I've been using the same feature built in to KDE and now Gnome for some time. And reading here about the struggles of Cinnamon users to get 3rd party red shift software working.

[SMG]

Hi to everyone. I don't mean to stir the pot or anything like that, but imagine my surprise when I saw this.

I recommend you read the Linux Mint Blog for updates from Clem. We're near the end of the month so there should be one coming soon.

LMDE 6 on the other hand is semi-rolling release and will get Cinnamon sooner.

Sooner than what? LMDE has traditionally received the Cinnamon update after the version was released in Main Edition. If past practice continues, that means LMDE 6 will not receive Cinnamon 6.4 until after LM22.1 is released.

[xenopeek]

I thought for minor releases LMDE gets Cinnamon release sooner. Maybe not. I spotted the 6.4 package in the repository so that may have given me false expectation. In any case LMDE 6 will get Cinnamon 6.4 as a regular update.

[scjet45]

What about us (loyal Mint) MATE users, why doesn't Mint have a MATE 1.28,* already?, -but it's ok, I know, 'cause Ubuntu hasn't upgraded that yet, oh my, (sarcastically/rhetorically spoken), but I'm quite sure Clem could, and without hurting Mint Cinnamon.

[JosephM]

It's always been this way. And in the long run, the next Mint release will get a more polished version of Cinnamon because of it.

[Hoser Rob]

Personally I think the users who are running CInnamon on bleeding edge distros and dealing with the bugs and bug reporting are quite loyal.

[JosephM]

Personally I think the users who are running CInnamon on bleeding edge distros and dealing with the bugs and bug reporting are quite loyal.

Agreed. Especially when you consider that the only people really running this stuff before then is a couple of devs.

[Omnimaxus]

It's always been this way. And in the long run, the next Mint release will get a more polished version of Cinnamon because of it.

I guess so. Can't argue with that.

[Omnimaxus]

Thank you to everyone who responded. We'll just have to wait, I suppose. After all, "good things come to those who wait."

[AZgl1800]

I like the Mint Cinnamon distro because it is just plain STABLE....

no surprises for me, it just works.

[Hoser Rob]

What about us (loyal Mint) MATE users, why doesn't Mint have a MATE 1.28,* already?, -but it's ok, I know, 'cause Ubuntu hasn't upgraded that yet, oh my, (sarcastically/rhetorically spoken), but I'm quite sure Clem could, and without hurting Mint Cinnamon.

What you're asking for basically is for Mint to put a desktop version that hasn't been tested enough into a long term support release. Ubuntu has nothing to do with this, any LTS distro would do the same thing.

[MiZoG]

We shouldn't confuse Mint loyalism to Cinnamon loyalism
Though admittedly it is not strange that they may coexist.

This impatience is all a Clem's "fault". He posted those screenshots that made Cinnamon users drooling

About Mate: There are no updates upstream. Mint relies on Ubuntu / Debian basic packages and Martin Wimpress who is instrumental in keeping Mate up-to-date on both Debian and Ubuntu had been occupied with other things (NixOS among them).
He posted this on Ubuntu Mate 24.10 release notes:

I have prepared packaging for MATE Desktop 1.28, along with the associated components but encountered some bugs and regressions I wasn’t able to get things to a standard I’m happy to ship be default, so it is tried and true MATE 1.26.2 one last time

That realistically means no Mate 1.28 during current Ubuntu LTS cycle because I don't think newer Mate packages will be ported back from 25.04 to 24.04. It still looks possible that 1.28 will come to next Debian Stable.

[nashalm]

You can stick with your mint version for the moment till the upgrade is announced and in the meantime try the new cinnamon 6.4 through virtualbox. This way you're far away from breaking things.

Regards