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New Year, New Desktop - Cinnamon!

There is nothing like starting the New Year off with a bang - and I don't mean only the fireworks out guests from Holland brought with them. The Linux Mint developers, led as always by Clement Lefebvre, have been working on a new Linux desktop, forked from Gnome 3.
Written by J.A. Watson, Contributor

There is nothing like starting the New Year off with a bang - and I don't mean only the fireworks out guests from Holland brought with them. The Linux Mint developers, led as always by Clement Lefebvre, have been working on a new Linux desktop, forked from Gnome 3. They have released the first glimpse of the result, called Cinnamon, just in time to bring good tidings in the New Year.

Cinnamon

It has been well known since the release of Gnome 3 that a lot of people weren't happy with the new Gnome desktop, and more importantly weren't happy with the direction in which Gnome was moving. That unhappiness became particularly clear when it was time to release Linux Mint 12, which is an Ubuntu derivative which shuns the Unity desktop in favor of Gnome, but now the Gnome desktop was considered equally unacceptable. In their first approach to solving this problem, the Clement and the Mint developers came up with MGSE, the "Mint Gnome Shell Extension", which pasted a lot of Gnome 2 style functionality onto the Gnome 3 desktop. While this was an impressive piece of software engineering, and it was reasonably successful - at least successful enough to not only keep a lot of people on Linux Mint, but also to attract enough new users that Mint jumped to the number one position on DistroWatch - the limitations inherent in this approach quickly became apparent. Users could see that it "looked" a lot more like Gnome 2 than it "acted", and the developers obviously found essentially the same thing from the opposite side, there was significant functionality which they simply could not add to Gnome 3 via a Shell Extension.

As a result of this, Clement and a group of developers decided to actually fork the Gnome 3 source code, thus giving them complete access and freedom in development. Their goal is to produce a desktop which is comfortable and familiar to current Gnome 2 users, built on the modern code base and libraries of Gnome 3. I have only just begun to install and test it, but so far it seems very, very good. If you have tried Linux Mint 12 with MGSE, you have almost certainly run into various things that you would like to do, that you used to do with Gnome 2, but aren't possible with Gnome 3 / MGSE. My first impression of Cinnamon is that many, perhaps most, of those things are possible again.

For those who are interested and perhaps a bit adventurous, and who are already running Mint 12, you can install the first test release of Cinnamon alongside your existing Gnome 3, MGSE and MATE desktops. Just go to the Mint software manager utility (or the synaptic package manager) and install the package "cinnamon-session". After the installation completes you have to either log out or reboot, and when the login screen comes up again click the sessions icon (the gear to the right of your login name) and select "Cinnamon". Then just smile, and be happy - oh, and send a few words of thanks and praise along to Clement and the developers if you like it as much as I do. Oh, and there's not a lot of danger in trying this out, because if you find that you don't like it, or there is some fatal flaw or bug that prevents your using it, you can just log out and select one of the other desktops before logging in again.

Clement mentions in his blog that Cinnamon is also available for Ubuntu 11.10, Fedora 16 and openSuSE 12.1. I haven't tried it on any of those yet, but I have all of them loaded in various places and on various systems, so I will do that as soon as time permits.

jw 2/1/2012

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