Cinnamon is a GTK+-based desktop environment. It originally started as a fork of the GNOME Shell, which is a user interface and was initially developed by (and for) Linux Mint. Cinnamon provides many features, including: Desktop effects, including animations, Applets, Desklets, and transition effects; A movable panel equipped with a main menu, launchers, a window list and the system tray; Various extensions; Applets that appear on the panel; Overview with functions similar to that in GNOME Shell; and Settings editor for easy customization. It can customize: The panel, The calendar, Themes, Desktop effects, Applets, Extensions.
Mint team released new version 3.0 of Cinnamon with new features and bugs fixes, rich settings to enhance desktop using Cinnamon Control Center. In version 3.0, and similar to MATE or Xfce, Cinnamon is an entire desktop environment built on GNOME technologies. It still uses tool-kits and libraries such as GTK or Clutter and it is still compatible with all GNOME applications, but it no longer requires GNOME itself to be installed. It now communicates directly with its own backend services, libraries and daemons: cinnamon-desktop, cinnamon-session and cinnamon-settings-daemon. This new version will be featured in Linux Mint 18 planned to come out soon.
Release Highlights
- Window management improvements on tiling, mapping and unmapping windows, compositor’s window groups and tracking of full screen windows
- Improved out of the box touchpad support (edge-scrolling and two-finger-scrolling can now be configured independently and are both enabled by default)
- New accessibility and sound settings (both rewritten as native cinnamon-settings modules)
- Battery powered devices can be renamed
- Different favorite applications can now be set for plain-text, documents and source code files
- Panel launchers now include application actions
- Animation effects are now enabled by default on dialogs and menus
- Favorites and system options can now be disabled in the menu applet
- The photo-frame desklet now also scans subdirectories
- Improved support for GTK 3.20, Spotify 0.27, Viber
Installation of Cinnamon Desktop
Warning: If you have installed any Linux Mint application, first of all remove that application(s) and PPA from your system.To install Cinnamon 3.0 in Ubuntu 16.04 Xenial/15.10 Wily/other related derivatives open Terminal (Press Ctrl+Alt+T) and copy the following commands in the Terminal:
There is a problem with shutdown dialog menu, you can fix it with these commands (source):
To uninstall Cinnamon, enter these commands in Terminal:
Are you excited about Cinnamon 3.0 Release?