The new and improved dual monitor support primarily addresses a longtime complaint from Cinnamon users with more than one screen: there was no way to set up your panels independently. That's been fixed, which means you can now have a completely different panel on each of your monitors. In fact, you don't have to have multiple screens to take advantage of this one. The updates to the panel mean you can now set up your single monitor with multiple instances; for example, one at the top and bottom of your screen (though I'm not sure why you'd want to).
Wait, did you catch that in the last paragraph? Cinnamon 2.6 has a new feature that addresses a longtime complaint from users. In fact, there are quite a few new features that can be traced right back to user-submitted bugs and feature requests, which is another thing that feels increasingly rare in Linux desktops.
This release sees the Cinnamon developers focusing on some of what are sometimes call "paper cut" fixes, which just means there's been a lot of attention to the details, particularly the small, but annoying problems. For example, this release adds a new panel applet called "inhibit" which temporarily bans all notifications. It also turns off screen locking and stops any auto dimming you have set up, making it a great tool for when you want to watch a video or play a game.
It can be a challenge to strike a balance between project vision and what users think they want, because what they say they want is not always the same thing as what they want or need. Has this update of Cinnamon managed it?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mmcmonster on Wednesday July 15 2015, @10:17AM
I like Linux Mint. The environment has sane defaults and each release makes small incremental updates.
More interestingly, they've come up with a release cycle which is quite nice. v17.2 is the current release and is based on their Long Term Support release, v17.0. So no need to re-install applications or worry about a complex config until the LTS is no longer supported (2019, it seems).
Given that Ubuntu PPAs can be added on, I think I'll be on this release for at least a couple years.