It"s a new month, and the Linux Mint team has released its report detailing work done last month, mainly covering a new sensor monitoring tool and a completely re-engineered screensaver.
The next version of Linux Mint will ship with a Sensors page in the System Reports tool. This new panel lists all detected hardware sensors and lets you monitor things like fan speeds and CPU temperatures as their values refresh automatically. The amount of information shown will depend entirely on what a computer"s manufacturer chooses to expose.
As for the new Cinnamon screensaver, Cinnamon itself now handles locking the screen directly, using its own toolkit and widgets instead of firing up a separate program. This change provides full compatibility with Wayland, a modern display protocol that the old screensaver could not support.
cinnamon-screensaver, the program the new screensaver is set to replace, has been around for a long time. It was launched way back in 2013 with Linux Mint 15 "Olivia". The application was created after the GNOME team"s crusade to "simplify" (read: strip down) everything on its desktop.
But there were several problems with it. Its biggest flaw was that it did not support Wayland. The transition between the desktop and the lock screen was also a bit janky, and it was a separate process that ran alongside the Cinnamon desktop session, not as a part of it.
The Linux Mint team plans to keep cinnamon-screensaver around for the upcoming release as a fallback before it gets deprecated in the release after that. This architectural change also fixed a bug that has plagued the operating system for a decade.
The old system had so many overlapping timers and processes that developers could never reliably reproduce the "privacy peek" where the desktop was briefly visible before the lock screen engaged. By integrating the lock screen into the window manager, the team finally isolated the bug, which turned out to be an Xorg rendering issue related to power-saving commands.