The Linux Mint team released today the Cinnamon 6.6 desktop environment, which will be the default in the upcoming Linux Mint 22.3 (Zena) release expected in late December 2025 or in early 2026.
The biggest change in Cinnamon 6.6 is a redesigned application menu applet that now lets you toggle between symbolic or full color icons for categories, support for color system buttons on hover, configurable Places and Bookmarks, as well as many visual changes.
Cinnamon 6.6 also modernizes keyboard handling and the virtual keyboard with a new button for switching the layout, a context menu shortcut for accessing the Keyboard Accessibility settings, improved theme support, improved suggestions visibility, and a fade-in/out effect when hiding and showing the keyboard.
The Settings app received some attention as well in Cinnamon 6.6 with a new Thunderbolt module, a new tab for tiling in the Windows module, a suspend option to battery-critical actions in the Power module, support for manual scheduling in the Night Light module, and support for the new System Information tool.
The Sound applet has been updated to fix an issue where the album art never reappeared after changing the volume, as well as a bug that prevented the volume icon toggle from restoring the last volume when muted.
The NetworkManager applet now shows multiple active VPN connections, the Workspace Switcher applet received an option to display window icons, the Printer applet now shows only when printing, and the Window List applet received support for notification badges.
Among other changes, Cinnamon 6.6 adds shortcuts to switch directly to a keyboard layout, reactors Python keybinding management, add a new keyboard shortcut for resetting zoom, adds an option to the notifications applet to show the newest notifications first, and adds an option to enable hot corners in full-screen.
It also improves mounts to the Places manager, adds an ‘Always’ schedule mode option to the Night Light feature, adds support for showing the OSD when using gestures to change the volume, exposes an option to choose the fractional scaling direction, and supports root authentication if there are no admin users.
Last but not least, Cinnamon 6.6 adds support for Alt+Tab to show windows only from the current monitor, updates the Expo effect to show on the monitor that the mouse is on, and fixes a bug that caused duplicate applet orders when dropping them in the same position.
Under the hood, Cinnamon 6.6 switches to XApp symbolic icons and an IBus runtime dependency. It also improves variable names for NetworkManager options when building Cinnamon from sources and allows building Cinnamon without any NetworkManager requirements.
As mentioned before, Cinnamon 6.6 will be the default desktop environment in the forthcoming Linux Mint 22.3 (Zena) distribution, but you should also be able to install it on other GNU/Linux distributions that offer the most recent Cinnamon release, such as Arch Linux, via their stable software repositories.
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