Cinnamon Desktop 2.4 has been announced recently, which will be featured in Linux Mint 17.1 “Rebecca” planned for the end of November and in LMDE 2 “Betsy” planned for Spring 2015.

According to the release note, the new Cinnamon Desktop brings below new features and improvements:

• Little improvements on memory usage and responsiveness to make your experience smoother and more enjoyable.
• Similar to Windows, “Super+e” now opens up the home directory.
• Single-button touchpads are now supported and actions for 2-finger and 3-finger clicks are configurable.
• Compositing in full-screen mode is now configurable and does not require to restart Cinnamon.
• The desktop font is now configurable.
• It is now possible to give the screensaver a custom date format, but also to change the font and the color of the text.
• Theme and Background Settings were completely redesigned, Background Slideshow supported.
• A “Slideshow” applet can be added to panel to control background slideshow.
• The Network Settings were rebased on GNOME’s latest configuration module.
• Add Notification and Privacy Settings.
• Nemo now allows quick customization of folder icons with folder-color-switcher.

For details, see the official release note.

Install / Upgrade to Cinnamon in Ubuntu / Linux Mint:

NOTE that Cinnamon 2.4 is released a month earlier than Linux Mint 17.1 for the specific purpose to squash new bugs and to gather feedback. So there’ll be bugs.

To help test the new desktop, you can follow below steps to install or upgrade to Cinnamon 2.4 from a nightly build PPA:

For Ubuntu 14.10 and Ubuntu 14.04, run commands below one by one in terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T):

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gwendal-lebihan-dev/cinnamon-nightly

sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get upgrade

sudo apt-get install cinnamon

(Optional) To remove it, run:

sudo apt-get remove cinnamon && sudo apt-get autoremove

sudo add-apt-repository -r ppa:gwendal-lebihan-dev/cinnamon-nightly && sudo apt-get update

For Linux Mint 17, do:

1. Launch Menu->Administration->”Software Sources”.
2. Tick the option “Unstable Packages (Romeo)”.
3. Carefully read the warning in the dialog that pops up and click “Yes” if appropriate.
4. Launch the Update Manager and click on “Refresh”.
5. If a new mintupdate version is shown, apply it.
6. Apply all updates related to Cinnamon (sort by version, 2.4.0 or 2.4.1, or by update type since they all come from Romeo).