Linux Mint improved Cinnamon menu and new tools

The Linux Mint team published their report on what they accomplished last month (October) across many different components of the distribution, including Cinnamon DE.

The team worked on the Cinnamon menu applet, adding an option that lets you reposition the search bar to the bottom of the menu. They also added a setting to move system buttons, like those for shutdown and settings, to the sidebar instead of having them locked to the bottom.

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Troubleshooting has also been improved with some changes to the old “System Reports” tool. The developers have renamed it to “System Information” to better reflect its expanded capabilities. It now has 4 new pages, namely USB, GPU, PCI, and BIOS.

The USB page provides a detailed view of connected devices, grouping them by controller, so you can monitor connection speeds and power consumption.

The GPU page displays information about your graphics card and hardware acceleration support, while the PCI page lists the internal components with their PCI IDs and the drivers they use. Finally, the BIOS page provides details about your motherboard, BIOS version, and whether you're using secure boot.

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The Linux Mint team also announced that Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) 6 will reach end of support on January 1, 2026. After this date, the release will no longer receive security updates or bug fixes. For users of the 64-bit version, an upgrade path to LMDE 7 is available.

Unfortunately, there is no upgrade path for those on the 32-bit version, as upstream projects like Debian have dropped support for this architecture. LMDE 6 was released almost three years ago, in late 2023, bringing features like Linux kernel 6.1 and Pipewire as the default sound server.

Other changes in the latest report include a new utility called “System Administration.” This tool focuses on tasks that require elevated privileges. Its first feature is a “Boot menu” page where you can change the GRUB menu, set its timeout, or add boot parameters to the kernel for hardware debugging.

The team also started a project called XSI (XApp Symbolic Icons) to fix an issue where the Adwaita icon theme stopped supporting non-GNOME applications, which caused icons to be missing in Cinnamon.

All major Mint projects now use XSI.

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Although the press releases will range from very select to rare, I said I'd pass...because sometimes the editors hide.