The Linux Mint team has just shared what it has been working on through October. There are quite a few improvements it has been making, but one notable one is the corner bar, which is very similar to the ‘show the desktop’ button on Windows that lives in the bottom right of the taskbar. Other changes include fewer password prompts, Flatpak support in Update Manager, and some visual refinements.
The new corner bar coming to Mint is less noticeable than the show the desktop button on Windows, however, it can be configured to be more powerful than the Windows implementation. Using customizable settings, you can choose the click action, the middle click action, and enable or disable peek at the desktop on hover. As the corner bar is in the lower right, you don’t even have to think about where to move the cursor.
Password requests have also been worked on, so they’re less intrusive. They’re no longer needed when using Synaptic and Update Manager, nor when removing a Flatpak. These programs will instead ask pkexec to remember your password, so you don’t need to enter it more than once. This should make things a little more convenient.
Finally, there are a few visual tweaks that should improve the overall experience. The Nemo file manager has been update so that in icon view, the icon will not be highlighted when you press an item, this makes it more consistent with the file manager’s list view. When you select files now, only the file names will be highlighted. In addition, the desktop icon in the file manager had the task bar at the top but in Mint it’s usually at the bottom, so this icon has been flipped. Display Settings has also been added as a menu item when accessing the desktop’s context menu.
The latest announcement didn’t say when these features were going to ship, they could either land as an update in the current version or ship with the next release, which is due around Christmas – the latter case is probably more likely.
Source: Linux Mint
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