Introducing Cinnamon
With Gnome 2 no longer an option we lost one of the most important upstream components our Linux Mint desktop was based on. Our entire focus shifted from innovating on the desktop, to patching existing alternatives such as Gnome Shell. We used MATE and MGSE to provide an easier transition away from Gnome 2, but without being able to truly offer an alternative that was better than Gnome 2. Both MATE and Gnome Shell are promising projects but MATE’s ultimate goal is to replicate Gnome 2 using GTK+ and Gnome Shell doesn’t provide what we need in a desktop and is going in a direction we do not want to follow. So for these reasons we’re designing a new desktop called Cinnamon, which leverages new technology and implements our vision.
If you like Linux Mint you’ll probably like Cinnamon. Both projects share the same philosophy and the same vision of what a desktop should be. In this vision, the computer works for you and makes it easy for you to be productive. Things aren’t hidden away but easy to access. With easy to use interfaces, a familiar layout, advanced technologies and principles you’ve already got to to use in Linux Mint, you’ll quickly find yourself at home. Configuration is also something important in Cinnamon as one of its fundamental goals is to make you feel at home… thus giving you the ability to change the way the desktop works, looks and behave.
Under the hood Cinnamon is forked from Gnome Shell and based on Mutter and Gnome 3. It’s already available for Linux Mint 12, Ubuntu 11.10, Fedora 16, OpenSUSE 12.1 and Arch Linux and will soon make its way (along with MGSE and MATE) to LMDE when Gnome 3.2 enters Debian Testing.
The latest release, Cinnamon 1.1.3, brings stability and improvements to what has already become our favorite desktop. Going forward, Cinnamon will gain themes, extensions and a control center. It will likely replace Gnome Shell / MGSE as the main desktop in Linux Mint, and we will continue to support MATE (which goal and technology are different but which is also getting better and better by the day).
A few cool things already in Cinnamon
- One unique bottom panel which you can auto-hide (and which location will be configurable in the future)
- Window list, “show desktop” button, systray icons and all the features introduced in MGSE
- A menu featuring the same layout as mintMenu, with options to add applications to favorites, to the desktop or to the panel
- Custom panel launchers
- A sound applet which lets you launch and control your music, and switch your sound from your speakers to your headphones and vice-versa.
Installing Cinnamon
You can install Cinnamon alongside other desktops (including MATE and Gnome Shell/MGSE). Install the package “cinnamon-session“, log out and choose the “Cinnamon” session at the login screen.
More information about Cinnamon
- Main website: http://cinnamon.linuxmint.com/
- Issues and milestones: https://github.com/linuxmint/Cinnamon/issues
- Git repository: https://github.com/linuxmint/Cinnamon/
Wow. looks cool. I love Cinnamon..
Love it Clem! Outstanding! Thanks 😉
Great news!
Looking forward to the LMDE AMD64 live version for testing!
This is fantastic.
I am really grateful for all the things MINT does for us,
Hope I can someday repay 🙂
Awesome news!
Looks fantastic! Hope we´ll get similarly colored themes for the LXDE version also (the panel). One more thing for you to do, the default background must go.. It looks a bit dull and plain, imo. 🙂
Good work!
The ubuntu 11.10 deb doesn’t add a session entry to choose from?
Personally I like this A LOT. I don’t think it is important to be “identical” to gnome 2, just something that is similarly effective and actually offers usability, which gnome shell fails at miserably other than for the tablet ui use case.
I notice we have the gnome 3 dash represented by an infinity in the upper corner, and this made me think of KDE and it’s cashew. I hope the panel can be moved to the top (as I prefer a top panel), and either that this new infinity “cashew” can be put in a lower corner, or a single top panel with both.
Just realised ive been stupid, its worth on the download page noting you have to install another deb to add the session.
That’s great news! I’ve played with Mint 12 out of loyalty for ‘LM’, however it hasn’t been an easy transition (no disrespect intended). I feel you guys did everything in your power to make something positive out of the new GNOME situation. I’m still a loyal user of LM and will continue be.
This is very good news,
Was sticking to mint 11 for as long as possible, now with this cinnamon project I’m really going to try it out one of these days…
Keep up the good work!
I have tried cinnamon and i found it very intuitive and easy to use! Great Job!
Screenshots and description look good, I am eager to try Cinnamon. BUT:
$ sudo aptitude install cinnamon-session
Err http://packages.linuxmint.com/ lisa/main cinnamon amd64 1.1.2
404 Not Found
Get: 1 http://packages.linuxmint.com/ lisa/main cinnamon-session all 1.0.0 [1,634 B]
Fetched 1,634 B in 0s (2,485 B/s)
E: Failed to fetch http://packages.linuxmint.com/pool/main/c/cinnamon/cinnamon_1.1.2_amd64.deb: 404 Not Found
E: Failed to fetch http://packages.linuxmint.com/pool/main/c/cinnamon/cinnamon_1.1.2_amd64.deb: 404 Not Found
Is Cinnamon currently not available for 64 bit or is there some different error?
Rootie: apt update
This is great! Please keep up the good work.
Neat wallpaper.
“Random Plasmid” http://submicron.deviantart.com/art/Random-Plasmid-Matter-Grey-166553335
Great news. I like both Cinnamon and MATE
Good bye Mint! Had enough of Gnome and trying to “fix” it. Switched to openSUSE KDE.
wonderful idea….bringing back the real freedom …thanks for Cinamon.
I’m using Cinnamon for the past week and it’s become my favorite mint 12 desktop already (even without the extra features)…and this new version looks even better…you are absolutely on the right track with this and i look forward to the various improvements and new features as it goes along…
By the time Mint 13 comes out it will be totally awesome…and so many other distros are interested in adopting it as well!
One question though, Clem….for the new updated version 1.1.3…will it come down in the updates and re-install itself over the 1.1.2 version? If not how do we change over to it?
Thanks and keep up the great work…the mint community loves it…
@Craig
use update manager .
Well, thank you.
I already got use to Gnome Shell, i bought even GeForce card to use it fluently, but if Cinnamon have to be new desktop in 13 then I have to install it and (get used) to it.
Nice to hear that Mint will have own desktop, finally, we can get use to it and only see improvement, no more surprises 🙂
Wow, sounds great! I’ll give it a try. I’ve been looking for an alternative to Ubuntu ever since they switched to Unity. I hate the way the screen goes black to view application icons. It reminds me of the infamous ‘User Access Control’ screen in Windows Vista. Hated it! That’s one of the reasons I switched to Linux in the first place. I tried lots of different flavors of Linux, but I always come back to Linux Mint. You guys are the best!
Looks amazing…I downloaded the DVD version of Mint 12 and loaded on my system. When I log out, I do not see the Cinnamon option and when I used synaptic package manager…no dice. Help!
I actually use Mint12 with Mate
I have an ATI with propietary drivers
Until Mutter-ATi problems will be solved …
Would it be possible to make a cinammon for ATI with compiz or any other modern CW instead of Mutter?
Wow!
That looks very good.
I think that is what most people here was requesting.
Keep up de good work guys.
Will test it tomorrow!
Clem, amazing! Cinnamon is very useful in the future use of Linux Mint. This will create a greater identity of the distribution.
Way to go guys! Very much looking forward to LM 13.
I am sad to say I had to skip LM 12 as Gnome 3 proved to be utterly unusable for me – and I did try! I went for Xubuntu, as XFCE is the best alternative – and not just because Linus think so too. However, I have also decided to keep sponsoring Mint regardless, as I had a gut feeling something nice – like going for Cinnamon – was going to happen sooner rather than later.
This decision has now been totally justified. I’d probably switch back to LM 12 + Cinnamon immediately, but I just can’t be arsed to reinstall my main machine for the fourth time in half the number of months.
Having said that, I am downloading LM12 to try Cinnamon on my netbook as I type this! 😀
Thanks again to Clem and all involved!
Thanks, and good luck.
I just ran it for the first time and it already has fixed something for me. (Firefox now opens where I want it – Dual monitors.)
Gee, I don’t know what to say anymore. Linux Mint was good from the start and it just get’s better. You guys are moving way ahead others, and not just *nixes, this is beyond Mac/Windows. Mint Linux described in one word =-{Comfortable}=- Thank you!
This is great. Simply brilliant. We go in small steps further to the recognizable environment.
@Rootie
Update the repos list first and then install cinnamon-session.
$ sudo apt-get update && apt-get install cinnamon-session.
@mank in: thanks…it came into the update manager a few minutes after i posted…installed beautifully and working great…
I’d love to see a KDE edition of mint or LMDE. I love KDE.
Edit by Clem: That’s coming up next, we’re almost ready to pass QA on it.
Version 1.1.1 did not work on my machine, but after the update to 1.1.2 it did. With errors, and I needed to keep the terminal window I started it from open. (I used cinnamon –replace)
This version gives me more errors, and I needed to reboot.
Do you have a forum for errors and such? I’ll happily post there and see if I can help a bit. I really like it.
Great news!!!.This is what we have been waiting for.Started to get used to Gnome shell a little,but i disliked some of the features,some help was found here though… https://extensions.gnome.org/ specially the extension that kills the hotspot in the upper left corner which i hated.It needs an on/off switch in cinnamon too!!.Thanks to Clem&Team for not leaving one stone unturned in the hunt for the best desktop!.Mint is one H**L of a distro,simply the best.
Hmm… The screenshots are not very promising – I kinda have an allergy for dark desktop themes. They might be trendy, but actually they make my eyes flow out.
…but I guess one can switch to a useable light theme (unlike in Unity), like the good old default mint theme…
Edit by Clem: The default theme in Cinnamon is grey because it’s the best color to develop it (it makes it easy to see both dark and light content). Linux Mint will provide its own Mint-Z theme for Cinnamon and starting with 1.1.4 the floor will be open for artists and help and guidance will be provided for them to create and port themes.
Love Cinnamon and love LinuxMint, I have it at work and home.
For Cinnamon, could you plan an option to bring the bar to the top instead of the bottom? I know most of the people like to have it at the bottom so it’s normal it’s default that way. An option in a future release would be great!
Thank you for your hard work, you are making a difference in the Linux world!
Who said Gnome 3 stifled inovation. Necessity is the mother of invention and Mint is the pioneer, always exploring new frontiers in the name of the community. THANKS!
love it! ^_^ gr8 job ,linux Mint keep it up! 🙂
Clem thanks for the hard work on Cinnamon. This is something I can us really like the lay out working good on my dell inspiron 1525 laptop good job.
What are system requirements for running Cinnamon?
Edit by Clem: Here on this box it takes between 60 and 75MB. Compared to Gnome Shell we introduced new features but none of them are resource hungry, but we also removed backends which interacted with Telepathy and Evolution, as well as the dash, applications in overview and a few other things. Altogether I’ve got the feeling the requirements are slightly smaller than Gnome Shell. In 1.1.4 we’ll also remove a lot of code inherited from Gnome Shell. I’m not sure that will actually make Cinnamon faster or give it a smaller footprint, we’re doing this mostly to clean up the code and to build new things upon it.
I’ve been using Cinnamon for a couple of weeks now, and I love it. It was amazingly good even as an alpha. This is gonna be a great ride!
Clem,
I am very proud of you. You know how to design, thats for sure!
Thank you for fixing the design issues of lm12. It looks much better now, and it feels much better.
Thanks,
lm user
Linux mint has created/fixed something great again. Leave beauty to the French and Italians! Something Apple or Windows will never understand.
Linux Mint and Revit Architecte are the greatest things that ever happened in the world of technology!
*Revit Architecture…. Sorry
Great work! I use LMDE and I’m very glad to see that it’s actually been worth the wait (and the “update withdrawal syndrome”), while you guys were working out your magic!…
“Gnome Shell doesn’t provide what we need in a desktop and is going in a direction we do not want to follow.”
Amen!
Good luck and I will be following Cinnimon, it’s good to see SOMEONE bringing a bit of sanity back to the Desktop!
Looks promising. I also felt that MGSE could quite deliver on what it was designed to do.
I also found the “new” Mint Menu much less appealing compared to the old one. Could use a litte more polish 🙂
Keep up the good work. I am definitely gonna try cinnamon.. mhm… cinnamon…
i consider gnome 3 the best desktop experience ever. still, i can see i’m one of the few, so i understand how important it gets to find new desktop styles for the average users. cinnamon was for me the best way to start 2012, hand in hand with the coolest linux team ih the world. keep rockin’, dudes!
tnx. this is the best gift for new year. thank you so much….
Quick question – I’m running Isadora, and have been considering what to do when the next LTM edition comes up. My main worry is that no current desktop environment has Gnome 2’s fantastic multi-timezone clock/calendar/weather utility, and the only other option seems to be desktop widgets, which I find annoying. Does/will Cinnamon include G2’s clock/calendar or something similar?
Edit by Clem: Well, why not 🙂 I wouldn’t mind getting this in there either… we’ll have to be careful about resources consumption and memory usage, but yes, definitely.
Had to come back and say more been look at cinnamon man this is really good work Clem and team I think with this ubuntu will have to rethink unity. I mean I was getting more and more people to try linux with the release of mint 9,10,& 11 but with gnome3 turn a lot of them right back off from linux but with cinnamon may be they will come back I mean Windows people need some thing that look a little like windows for them to feel comfortable with it. I really hope you guys keep up the good work as for as I’m concerned you or going in the right direction with your work.
Can we get rid of that stupid icon on the top left?
Edit by Clem: Yes, that’s configurable via gsettings. We’ll introduce graphical config tools in 1.1.4.
And another thing I forgot to say, the battery icon seems to be bigger than the others, why?
I switched from Ubuntu to LMDE because Canonical did this with Unity. I assume Cinnamon is open and actually useful, compared to Unity so I will give it a try when it’s available.
Yes, yes, yes! Now you’re talkin’! Best of both, no, wait, THREE worlds! Now, make the configurabiltiy of GNOME 2.x available, and I’m there! So nice to know someone is listening, and not dictating. 🙂
Cinnamon is remarkable, Clem. You’ve done astonishing work in a very short space of time and there’s no doubt you’re quickly turning Linux Mint into the ultimate Gnome 3 distro available. I look forward to it’s continued development.
How does this impact on MATE? Will you continue your work on that side? I’m not about to make any demands but I think it would be a shame to lose it. Just a query.
Do keep up the amazing work, Linux Mint is really the most exciting OS on the field.
Warm regards
Bruce
Edit by Clem: MATE is an important project as well. I help over there too, but not as a dev. MATE is going towards a 1.2.0 stable release and I can’t wait to put my hands on it. With Cinnamon we’re keeping a traditional desktop but we’re changing our vision because we can now do more than before and change almost all aspects of the desktop. With MATE we’re re-creating Gnome 2. No matter how cool Cinnamon is going to become, it will never be as good a Gnome 2 desktop than MATE. I’m not going to bet on anything and decide on what people should use, we’ll support both. If in the future Cinnamon isn’t popular, we’ll drop it. If it’s MATE, we’ll drop MATE. My personal intuition though, is that these two desktops will quickly become the #1 and #2 most popular desktops within the Linux community. And if I’m proven wrong by Unity and Gnome Shell, then even better. As the leader of Linux Mint I’ll always do what makes the most sense for Linux Mint, so whichever desktop turns out to be a success, we’ll always use the best option available. What we’re doing right now, from a Mint perspective, is giving ourselves more choice and getting involved to guarantee the quality of the next releases.
Great great news!
some questions :
– will there be a good old gnome 2 menu bar (apps – places – system) available for cinnamon ?
– will cinnamon follow (be based on) Gnome Shell developpement (3.2, 3.4 etc.) or is it on its own way now ?
– will extensions (shell extensions, themes etc.) be compatible or will they need special devs ?
wish cinnamon a nice life and i am pretty sure other great distros will follow this project. You are a leader now !
Edit by Clem:
– Not as part of Cinnamon but it could come as an extension, or an applet (I’d like to go back to the concept of applets, so we might add support for this special type of extensions)
– That’s a tricky question. We didn’t need to fork more than Shell itself at the moment but to be honest with you, if anything doesn’t go our way we’ll modify it to suit our needs… so today Cinnamon is just a shell on top of Mutter and Gnome 3, tomorrow it might be more, or it might work with other WMs such as Compiz or Metacity.. it’s really too early to say.
– Extensions won’t be compatible with Gnome Shell, they can’t be due to their design, and we also want to change the way extensions work in Cinnamon, so they’ll be different. Themes are compatible to a certain extent… i.e. you can apply a Gnome Shell theme to Cinnamon, and it does work, but of course, since it’s missing the style definition for the elements and features which don’t exist in Gnome Shell, it doesn’t look very nice. Cinnamon 1.1.4 will be a major milestone for themes and extensions developers, and along with a control center, our main priority in this next release.
You guys rock! I really like where Linux Mint is headed. I agree with SteveP. Configurability is very important to me (and many other people).
Wow, great gains over GNOME Shell! Used it in a VM of Linux Mint 12 and I love it. Once it makes it to LMDE (which I use on both of my laptops) I’ll be using it there too.
Keep up the awesome work.
nice, will have a play, thanks for all the hard work 🙂
Btw I have LMDE on my laptop and yesterday in VirtualBox installed Debian unstable and that is still on Gnome 3.0 which really surprised me, so it looks like 3.2 for testing maybe a way off yet 🙁
I must say, I’m impressed.
From the beginning, I liked the look of Gnome 3, but I had my problems with the usability and handling of certain things.
This release of Cinnamon, even though it is in an early alpha, feels much more natural than Gnome3 did for me.
Great work Clem and team, really appreciate it.
Didn’t see that one coming 😀
What else do you guys have up your sleves? 😉
Edit by Clem: Oh we’ve got loads!! I don’t like talking about things until they’re ready though, so the rest will have to wait 🙂
really nice to see some nice progress.
still have to wait myself tho until i can move the panel to the top and remove window lists from it (since im so used with dockbarx)
as allways, keep up the good work!
i use a top and bottom layout, with integration of the top pannel menu and window controls like this:
https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/K-q_Ixmjh0gqnTiQiZkty9MTjNZETYmyPJy0liipFm0?feat=directlink
and this:
https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/MUoLhHlmpKGTiuehKNdDs9MTjNZETYmyPJy0liipFm0?feat=directlink
Will it be possible to do that in the future on cinnamon, i mean a pluging so the window will blend inside the pannel, I really like that tweak on Gnome 2
Edit by Clem: It might take some time but letting people have the panel on top or even have a second panel at the bottom is something we’re planning to do. About the window blending into the panel, I guess you’d need some kind of global menu applet and for maximized windows not to show a window bar… I’m not really sure.
ps. I forgot to write… Thanks to make the desktop usable on a PC again.
@Clem – you are certainly not letting the grass grow under your feet and it looks well worth exploring. Sadly my Linux Mint12 installation is a persistent USBkey, prepared with Gloria and then created with Isadora, so although ‘cinnamon-session’ does install and seems to be there, I need to know Lisa’s initial default username and password in order to logout and then login so as to invoke it, so do you recall what they are ?
Edit by Clem: username is “mint”, password is blank (i.e. none, just press Enter if asked for the password). Btw, we’re moving to hybrid ISOs starting with Mint 12 KDE 😉
Clem, congratulations for the amazing work with Cinnamon. I’d like to suggest to create the possibility of activating the menu by just hovering the mouse over its icon, so that we wouldn’t need to click on it. You could create this feature as a configuration option. Is it possible?
Edit by Clem: That’s the one thing everybody asks at the moment :)) We’ll get it done.
I wanna live with a cinnamon girl
I could be happy the rest of my life
With a cinnamon girl.
😀
Yeah…saw the news this morning that this was out. I simply installed both entries out of the Software Manager and had no problems. While I was satisfied with MATE, Cinnamon really has a nice look and feel without getting in the way and is obviously much more modern-looking than MATE.
I am very glad that Clem is both working on Cinnamon and being a mate to MATE. That is going to be great for us as users so we get the best possible options.
One problem to report…just as in MGSE for the short time I used it, I’m getting occasional mysterious sound events that don’t seem to correspond to anything happening on my screen.
This looks very good and I think it’s the best way forward!
A couple of things
– If you, like me, used gnome fallback + compiz, remove compiz –replace from your startup. It can’t coexist with Cinnamon so when logging into Cinnamon you won’t get the full desktop.
– Cinnamon has no way of configuring printers like you have if you use fallback. You can add/remove but not do any changes. Adding a printer is also very poor, you cannot specify what technology to use to print (IPP/HPLIP/LPR etc).
– No option to disconnect from a wireless network, you need to disable wireless completely do do this which implies disabling the radio interface
how to add pannel on top?
@adam you can install Avant Window Navigator and you can it move top
sudo apt-get install avant-window-navigator awn-applets-all python-awn-extras alacarte
So I decided to try using Cinnamon today and, I must say, it’s more responsive and runs faster than GNOME 3. it also feels much more like Gnome2. It
But I am already used to using the “expose” feature on GNOME 3 and I was wondering if there is an option to program a button to activate “expose” rather than having to move the mouse pointer to the top left of the screen. i am used to activating “expose” by using the special/windows button and when i do this in cinnamon it instead brings up the Mint menu.
Edit by Clem: CTRL+ALT+UP 😉
Hey Clem could you include those two dark wallpapers with the next release of Mint or in an update?
I’m not a fan of dark themes, is there any way I can lighten it, or maybe you could supply a theme something like clearlooks or murine like the earlier Mint versions.
I’ll wait until I can have the task bar at the top, which I do on all my computers, so will stick with MGSE for the moment (with lots of extra extensions). I’m glad to see you have added logoff and shutdown to the menu.
sorry about question 71, it’s allready answered in 65
I actually use Mint12 with Mate
Outstanding! Thanks,
The idea is perfect. The exact way I expected Gnome 3 to be. Clem, your are a genius!
The bad thing for me: although I like the new Shell, it seems the Nvidia Geforce 7300 GS cards aren’t compatible at all, not even other x7 series GPUs. I hope it will be fixed mainstream one day. I’ve seen many people browsing the internet having the same issues, not only in the debian based distros but also in Fedora and OpenSuse. Till it get’s fixed I’ll be using the old good XFCE.
Ich kann nicht leider gut englisch, so schreibe ich deutsch…
Ich wollte nur sagen, dass Linux mint super ist. Ich habe Linux mint als Anfänger in Linuxwelt benutzt. Ich war immer zufrieden. Ich bekam immer mehr, wie mir Ubuntu leisten konnte.
Ich wünsche viel Glück und Erfolg!!!
This can only be good news, and looking at the screenshots it will be great.
However I am waiting for a LMDE64 bit release as I have just rebuilt my netbook based on LMDE to get away from the awfulness that is gnome 3 / Gnome shell 🙁
Roll on LMDE availability
Thanks to all the Mint Devs, we are all truely greatful for your hard work.
I didn’t like any of the post-Gnome2 solutions either. However if Clem is developing yet another solution, I’m getting my hopes up, because so far any software Clem touched became something better.
P.S. Must work with Compiz
P.S.2 Did you also notice that donations and sponsorships growth is exponential – now this is encouraging.
Don’t tell anyone, but cinnamon works even better than mate on my older laptop lacking hardware graphic acceleration. 🙂
agree with eiver, the must is compiz work with Cinnamon
Cinnamon is The Best of Mint 12
Since Paolo wrote in German, I’ve taken the liberty of translating his comment here. He said:
“Unfortunately, I’m not good at English, so I’ll write in German. . .
I just want to say that Linux Mint is super. I used Linux Mint as a beginner in the Linux world. I was always satisfied. I got ever more satisfied, as I got better acquainted with Ubuntu.
I wish you much luck and success!!!”
I’m in complete agreement with Paolo, and I’m looking forward to getting acquainted with Cinnamon. It appears to me to be a very promising new path out of the Gnome 3 mire, and it’s yet another example of Clem’s clear and sensible vision. Bravo, Clem and crew!!!
Congratulations to the Cinnamon Developer Team.
Could you add icon based window list and window preview as talika or dockbarx.
Looks great and would like to install it but it doesn’t support separate x screens, bug with mutter?
Currently use LM11 LXDE as I connect both my monitor and TV via HDMI (Nvidia)
Somehow unity works with separate x screens
.
Fixing things that aren’t broken is a fault.
Freezing the interface at 11’s look should have been a priority.
Will skip 12, hoping they come to their senses.
This is absolutely the right direction for Mint. I started running Mint-12 alongside Mint-10 as a dual boot as soon as 12 was released. Mint-10 was (is) a really great distro. Whenever I boot Mint-10 I realize how much I miss its features and being able to customize the (Gnome 2) desktop. I just installed Cinnamon and my Mint-12 desktop looks and works better already. I’m looking forward to the release of new features. Thanks Mint Team, keep up the good work!
I had some misgivings about forking a major upstream component like this, but I have to admit this looks good and feels better than the original MGSE session. From the first login, I like this. I never really liked the default with Mint 12 – I appreciate what the devs were trying to do, but it always felt like a desktop that didn’t quite know what it wanted to be. This feels like a more solid identity.
I like Cinnamon (it’s the closest to Mint 11, yet still has a few of the nice things about the new Gnome). I can’t wait to see some of the new configuration options and tweaks in 1.1.4.
Simply amazing, Clem. Not only have you ensured the continuation and high profile of Linux Mint, but you have provided and shared the way out of the Gnome Shell quagmire with most of the major distributions in the Linux world. Who would have guessed two years ago that little old Linux Mint would become a leader to the future of the Linux Desktop experience. Congratulations to you and the Cinnamon team, and my best wishes for a continually amazing 2012.
Cinnamon is looking GREAT!!! I was able get the two gnome-shell extensions that I wanted in cinnamon to work (weather and color icons). So my humble opinion is that I prefer Cinnamon to both MGSE and MATE. Thank you Clem and Team!!!!!
Since MATE is based on Gnome 2.x, then Gnome apps built on 3.X will not run on it, or Gnome 3.X will be install side by side with 2.X. In this scenario, it really looks like a maintenance nightmare.
I think Cinnamon is the way to go for ease of development maintenance. Though it may be short from the fetures that Gnome 2.X desktop offers, it will improve in every release.
I offer my best wishes to the Linux Mint Team 🙂
I’m almost in tears here. Clem and team, you’ve surpassed yourself yet again. I’m in totally love with my computer again, after a very minor and brief falling out and frustration session. i did eventually find out what the problem was with MGSE on my pc. it was the proprietory driver, so once i realised that and refused to install it, it behaved pretty well, but not as well as i’d like, and although the overall look was okay with me, the performance and the inherent lag when clicking on things was getting to be a pain. Now it’s lag free. click and it’s done. Mint rocks! congratulations to you clem and the entire team, and thanks. 🙂
I haven’t tried gnome 3 yet. Will this new desktop finally fix the problem with panel applets crashing when logging in? I hate that.
No more forks, please! We have KDE (and XFCE) and he’s great.
K3B > Brasero
Mint’s team are groping in the dark with so many versions/projects.
I’m still waiting my KDE version..
suitable for my hp mini netbook… 🙂
I just installed Cinnamon and I love it. MGSE is good, but this is great. Keep up the great innovation and work. 😀
@ Clem.
You’ve stated previously that KDE would be your priority after LM12 and I wonder how this can be with so many updates, releases and posts on Cinnamon.
Looking at Git it’s obvious that you are spending a great deal of time on Cinnamon so your recent statement on KDE (like many before) seems without any substance.
I never fail to be impressed, and surprised at the things Clem is up to. I was checking the blog every day, hoping for some news of KDE release and here I find out he’s released an entirely new desktop environment! I love being in on the ground level of a completely new DE, which has been a long time coming..the others are great but when’s the last time something completely different like this came out? Bringing choices to the users, that’s what it’s all about! I wonder what Linus has to say about Cinnamon 😉
Clem, you are greatly admired and respected for all the hard work that you do. I wish Cinnamon a tasty success!
That’s why I love Mint. A distro, trying hard to keep users happy. Whatever happens next is a different thing. But with Clem we are rest assured that we will be using the best of gnome3 (MATE, MGSE and CINNAMON).
@Clem : I have a complaint, why we are given this news of Cinnamon so late, while at other blogs it is already appeared before a week or two. I am using it from past week after getting news from other blogs.
@Clem : I have a question, you said above that for KDE Q&A are getting ready. Can we help/take part in KDE Q&A?
Bobby: For two reasons. I’m not interested in debating whether the fork is a good idea or not and I don’t like talking about things that are not ready. I do it sometimes under pressure and it usually backfires (you can see Fandangio’s comment as a good example of this for instance). So because of this I much prefer to get it done and then to show it to the World. It cuts any controversy short and we can focus on talking about constructive things instead. When Cinnamon started (version 1.0.0) it was considered Alpha, and though it was interesting to some already it was still missing some features to be considered a viable alternative to Gnome Shell and MGSE for Linux Mint 12 users. This changed with 1.1.3, and so we’re making this announcement. Other blogs talk about Linux in general, but here on the Linux Mint blog we only talk about what relates to Mint. Cinnamon has its own blog.
Bobby, about KDE: There would be no point in QA being public… that’s the role of the RC release which QA is for. Our first ISO almost passed QA (there’s an issue in Ubiquity which isn’t a stopper but which I’d like to fix and I’d like to introduce hybrid ISOs in the RC as well). I’m currently working on the two hybrid KDE ISO (32 and 64-bit) and on this ubiquity bug. They should be both in QA by the end of the week and I expect both of them to pass the tests so we should be getting an RC soon. When the RC is out, that’s when we need your help. I personally took over the maintenance of the KDE edition and I have to admit I’m not as familiar with KDE as I am with other DEs. We’re also hiring an extra dev. for the whole year of 2012 who will be focusing mostly on KDE (I can’t talk too much about this yet, we’ll make a separate announcement when this is finalized) and so he’ll help iron things out for the stable release.
Great job #MintTeam.
Guys, don’t forget to spread the words through twitter / Facebook / Google+.
+1 for the Clearlooks theme
Thanks Clem !
I bet Mint is the only Linux distro with
Multi desktop environments built right into the base install.
Linux has always been about Choice and lately Mint
is the only one to really give users a real choice.
(For me, I choose MATE and hope you will continue to support it.)
Obviously Cinnamon is a HUGE success. I’ve been using it for a few days and I can tell you, this is the first time I am enjoying my computer again. I thought that was gone for good with Gnome 3. Thank God and Clem and friends for thinking outside the Gnome 3 box. 😀
I really like Cinnamon so far. I’ve been using Linux Mint since version 10, and really liked Mint 11. When 12 came out, I went in with both feet, but struggled to the point of going back to 11. I read the post about Cinnamon and immediately dove back in. I’ve been using it for about 4 hours now and I’m staying in the pool. Thank you for the work put in to this. I really appreciate that this team listened and worked to create this great desktop environment for us, AND, on a free operating system. This makes me want to donate!
@ fandangio: please don’t “troll” here…this blog is about Cinnamon…Clem is working on testing your kde at the same time…stop assuming that just because one thing is being worked on that the other isn’t…you forget he has 2 other developers working with him…as well as the “iso testing” community…
it’s quite funny, really, i get accused of “trolling” in the kde mint thread but then you guys from that thread come here and troll….
this is for comments and feedback about Cinnamon…please show some maturity and respect….Thank you…
I love Cinnamon! Thanks Clem! I was getting quite frustrated with Gnome 3 crashes but everything seems a lot better now … and it’s cool!
I’m really excited, and already installed Cinnamon on my desktop, and LOVE IT!!! So much that I uninstalled all other sessions. 🙂
I’m REALLY looking forward to ?Linux Mint 13 around my birthday at the end of May. <3
Have fun going down Unity Road, destination Broken Proprietary UI Developed By A Handful of People.
Wow, thinking I would need to wait for LM 13, before pushing a new version at friends and family, but Cinnamon has the looks and potental for the best of both sides! Could not get Cinnamon from CLi or update mgr, but there it was in Software Manager. Thanks Clem and team
Amazing idea
LM will be no1 for a long time if this cinnamon will be fully functional
great job
Actually have gotten used to Gnome 3.2, but love this option as well. been using it all day!
Great work Clem…
It is great that you listen to the community and develop to the majority need… Now all that is needed is a complete break from Ubuntu with full focus upon Debian… or better ( imho ) closer ties / join with the debian community. Free Debian from Gnomes and Trolls or what ever….
The only reason I used GNOME 2 was because of the speed and stability it offered as a desktop. However, after testing Cinnamon for a while, it looks like it’s now possible to have a good appearing desktop, and speed and stability. Keep it up LM devs, this is amazing!
great desktop, i’ve just installed it!
So….I am logged into a Cinnamon session after downloading this newest release and really like what I am seeing. I don’t, however, see how to autohide the bottom bar. Right clicking brings up nothing. Anyone care to point out what it is that I am missing. I’m pretty sure it’s something obvious.
Edit by Clem: Eventually, a right-click on the panel will give you a contextual menu from which to launch Cinnamon preferences. For now you need to use gsettings (“gsettings set org.cinnamon panel-autohide true” in a terminal).
I’m still waiting for Linux Mint LXDE 12, though, since my laptop can’t handle this desktop.
But still, keep up the good work!
Really fantastic! Once again the mint team out does themselves. I for one cannot wait to see where cinnamon takes us. A sincere thank you for all the hard work and consideration that goes on here.
Thank you so much for this news Clem. Because Gnome (which I’ve been using since 2001) has gone crazy, I’ve been trying different distributions of Debian-based Linux and different desktop environments. I’ve settled on LMDE 64bit with XFCE. But I want Gnome-like features which will be in the new Cinnamon project. Once again, thank you.
awesome job guys! thumbs up, keep it up. \m/
clem:
I am very thankful for fresh news about KDE version.
UGLY AS HELL WERE IS A BLUE THEME
Edit Clem: Grey is great for developing Cinnamon. Themes will come after 1.1.4.
Here is the German speaking Translation: http://www.linuxmintusers.de/index.php?topic=5683.0
Really fantastic work Clem!
It’s a pity that Cinnamon hasn’t appeared installed by default with Lisa… but it’s really amazing how quickly you responded to the criticism…
That’s why Mint is the best distro: you listen what people say, and you do what people want.
Thank you very much!
That’s a very good news and Mint is just amazingly progressing ahead.
and just as i was starting to scream at my monitor!
GNOME 2 IS THE BEST EVER…..!!
Music to my ears!
Im still rolling with gnome2 and I tried to switch to KDE but it is too ugly for my taste, and the theming is so limited for qtcurve & oxygen engines, appart from QuantumStyle, it just cannot compare to GTK3 nor to GTK2 simplicity and ability of making stuff look good.
So i had high hopes for XFCE or MATE as an alternative to GNOME2 usability, and now it seems salvation is on the way.
GNOME2 usability + “eye candy” ability to customise via CSS3 is the right path for desktop OS.
Superb ……. Cinnamon is now my default desktop …… Brilliant!
Updated the repository but no joy.
E: Unable to locate package cinnamon-session
Hi Clem,
thx for the news to KDE, very appriciated!
Could you please tell us wether it will be
Ubuntu or Debian based?
Good work regarding Cinnamon!
Thx
pAt
Well being a new comer to the Linux Mint world but not the Linux world. I have been running Linux Mint 12 and 11 LMDE for several months now and I love them. Although I am dissapointed in the ATI issues with the desktop. I was hoping when I saw this Cinnamon post that you had resolved it. I am not going to give on Linux Mint but I do hope this will be resolved soon.
Thanks again for all of your hard work and a great product.
Great!!!
I hope, you will incloude it in following mint release as default Desktop Environment!
Good job and thank you 😉
@ demonr6
Go here for Deb packages:
https://github.com/linuxmint/Cinnamon/downloads
I think I’m actually going to replace Katya today after reading about Cinnamon. I haven’t gotten it to work right in a VM even with 3D support enabled but I’m guessing it will work on bare hardware.
Next can I upgrade to Lisa or would I be best of to install on top of Lisa? I have a separate partition for /home and I’m assuming that I can simply use that partition for /home in Lisa and things will be Kosher.
As a direct reply to comment 110 I don’t think that this is going to be the same as Unity. For starters they are branching Cinnamon to other distributions which will help development and testing greatly. For my knowledge Unity is only in Ubuntu. Even though I have searched for ways to add it to Katya for fun.
So thanks Clem for all your hard work and I’m glad to know that you actually read the comments and respond. That is very cool, it proves that you do truly listen to the masses.
Great news. I went away from mint since mintx theme. This one is attracting me again. Awesome work clem. You are truly amazing.
I was completely underwhelmed by Mint 12. MATE is nowhere near ready for prime time and frankly MSGE is crap (sorry but Bandaids are a waste of time and resources as far as I’m concerned). That being said, this Cinnamon interface looks like it holds real promise. I’ll hold off on testing until it becomes more mature and continue to stay with Mint 10 until such time (my ATI HD5670 works just tickety-boo with Mint 10). The existence of Cinnamon and a KDE implementation forestalls my necessity to find a new distro; you’ve definitely got my interest.
Take a look also at what Linpus Linux and Linux Deepin made. (For inspiration, or to not miss the train or just for fun)
http://www.linpus.com/products.html
http://www.linuxdeepin.com/feature#desktop (in Chinese)
It’s very cool and lovely
I was upset about 2 taskbars but now I feel I’m at Home.
One little problem:
When removing a program from favorites list, other icons don’t scale up to get whole column.
W O W. Clem looks like you did it again. It looks like my wonderful desktop my return. KUDOS.
Clem, I installed 12 to try to start acclimating myself to GNOME Shell. And then I discovered Cinnamon. I am now installing 12 on a second machine and I am actually looking forward to LMDE’s future on a third machine. Excellent work, sir!
Hi, a suggestion for the menu. Please make ENTER runs the first application. I’m seriously tired of having to use the mouse to click the entry.
@Clem : Thanks for replying. Yeh, I can see that Cinnamon is much mature now. It seems somehow I just missed Cinnamon blog. I just posted some feedback there at Cinnamon blog. As regards KDE, we will wait for RC.
Just to be on the lighter side, most of the guys who installed LM Gnome3 are not using MATE, many of us including others started using MGSE and are enjoying it. Now Cinnamon seems more appealing and familiar and it seems better than MGSE. So if everyone is using MGSE and now Cinnamon, it puts question mark on the future of MATE.
Thanks to you and your team for all the great work you are doing.
Cinnamon does not support my ATI-card so iam stuck with fallback mode. The GUI is not easy to customize and the whole layout feels like a pale ripoff of Gnome3.
Im choose MATE beacause the graphics works and it gives me the Gnome2 experience way better than Cinnamon which is stiff and chunky to handle.
Thumbs up for new ideas, but Cinnamon needs a lot more work and improvements.
Decent work, now how about doing something useful like updating the KDE version of Mint?
WOW! Love it Clem! Nice change and much easier to use.
@Clem
Great job! This is far more usable. I don’t get that band-aide feeling nearly as much as I do with MGSE. You are definitely on the right track. I will say that I’m still looking for a more robust printer configuration tool, natively that is. In other words, I can’t seem to figure out how to point a printer to a .ppd file. This is one key reason why I’ve been dragging my feet on migrating to Gnome 3, and looking intently at KDE for an option. While not nearly as important, screensaver config is also lacking.
Do you have any input on this? Is it gone for good, or can we expect to see some incarnation of these tools in the future?
On a different yet related note, it is almost spine tingling to see that the Mint team is heading up such an out-of-the-box alternative to address this controversy–so much so that other distros are hitching a ride. That’s pure excitement, and I can’t wait to see it develop. Again, great job!
Cinnamon is awesome! 😀 Nice combination of Gnome 2 and 3, and it looks great. 🙂
Hats off to the team. Can’t wait to test it, once I’m sure power/heating issues with my x121e do not emerge.
Great great great! I am feeling more secure now to moving LM13! I still using LM11 but now I know that future for mint is fantastic! I have a little worry here, MATE MGSE Cinamon that is not to much??? I just thinking about my notebook is not to havy to runing all of that????
Will it be possible for you to produce a version of the Gnome Global Menu for this? Obviously with the panel at the top.
Oh almost forgot. A 3d OSX like dock similar to Docky would also be great.
Loving this!!!!!!!!!!!11111111111111111
Awesome guys… Cinnamon is really what gnome 3 should be.
I am a busy physician and just switched to Mint 12 (with automatic login to a Mate session) from Ubuntu on my personal laptop, as the new user interfaces (Unity, Gnome3) are a drain on productivity and I don’t have time or patience to relearn how to use a computer. While Cinnamon looks great, I hope Mate (or other Gnome2 fork) will continue to be available, as I would love to use it for 5 years on Mint 13.
Haven’t left LM10 yet, but this may convince me to do it. I will miss 10, though, b/c it’s the best distro I’ve come across yet!
I installed Linux Mint 12, and then saw the link to cinnamon on the home page, so I installed Cinnamon using apt-get. The install looked to have been successful.
Cinnamon seems to be an option at logon, but after I choose Cinnamon and sign in I am taken to the Gnome3 desktop. What am I doing wrong?
I love it! Thank you Clem.
Great news!
I just prefer to see ‘search filed’ in bottom.
AMC@141
I’m testing Cinnamon right now on a machine at work. It is by far, Clem’s best effort yet with the Gnome 3 debacle, and I am excited to see it develop. However, if you look at comment 135, I asked about some functionality that is still missing that is critical to me personally. Clem did discuss some things that will be addressed at some point in the future, which is good to hear. But I’m still not going to be migrating to LM12 on my home PC because of the stated issues. I will test it, however.
That being said, if you still like LM10, what reason do you have to change? Do you have a device or something that isn’t supported yet? If you have an old hard drive, maybe you could spin up LM12 on that and test it out. Mint 10 is fantastic, and so is Mint 9 for that matter. For some reason, I’ve had the best luck with Mint 9 on my home PC. Overall, Mint 9 and 10 are the best ones yet. It depends on individual experiences as to which one is preferred. You prefer 10, while I prefer 9, and both of us have our special reasons.
The bottom line is, don’t be scared to stay with Mint 10 for your primary machine. It is still rock solid and well supported. And if you have some space to spin up an LM12 machine for testing, you can have a lot of fun watching things take shape with LM12. Anyway, have fun with it.
Very impressive! LM was already the best Gnome 3 distro out there, and this is even better.
Cinnamon 1.1.3 has become my preferred DE with this release.
Clem, you have done some outstanding work over the last few months, but this really looks like the future for LM. I love it.
If you can make Cinnamon compatible with Compiz it will, without any shadow of doubt, become the most popular DE in “Linux Land” (actually, I’m sure it will anyway!).
Thank you for all your hard work.
So I upgraded today to Lisa so I could experience Cinnamon. I logged into Cinnamon and was very disappointed.
Although it was shortly after that I realized that I had somehow logged into the standard Gnome with MGSE. After a quick log out and into the actual Cinnamon I was instantly impressed.
Removing the top bar alone was huge for me. It’s amazing how much of a difference that little change makes. I suppose it’s as little of a change as removing the menu bar in Firefox. It just makes the screen feel so much roomier. Besides with my limited time in Gnome Shell I would have to say the top bar was useless anyway.
I might end up switching to Mate, but at least Cinnamon make Gnome Shell usable.
My congrats again it looks great. Please keep up the great work am looking forward to version 1.1.4.
Hi to all, i translate this blog post in italian language for all italian Mint users:
http://ubuntu-inside.blogspot.com/2012/01/introduzione-cinnamon.html
Cinnamon sounds very nice. I’ll try it soon.
Thanks 🙂
I will run this on my LMDE desktops the moment it is available! I have been really struggling with what desktop I would use when the inevitable Gnome Shell migration occurs. I really don’t like the direction Gnome shell has headed, Mate is really just “standing still”, XFCE is solid but spartan, KDE is too cluttered (and back to some instability)… it has been quite a quandry.
Well Clem… you have already made my year. LMDE+Cinnamon sounds like a complete winner to me!
Thank you. <3
I’m always impressed at the small-mindedness when posts are moderated because someone calls a spade a spade and deson’t follow the typical flowery congratulatory accolades.
So let’s try this again and see how long it takes before this is “moderated”.
LM12 isn’t cooked.
MATE isn’t ready for prime time.
MSGE is a bandaid and IMNSHO crap.
Cinnamon however looks like a quality effort with some serious thought behind it. A KDE Mint version would also be a tremendous asset.
I’ll have a look at Cinnamon when it becomes more mature – at this point it’s quite likely that too many things will still be unfinished and in flux to make it worthwhile for me but it certainly holds far more promise than the disaster that is MSGE.
I was convinced that I’d have to find another distro to upgrade to when 12 came out but Cinnamon has me reconsidering and the likelihood of a Mint-flavoured KDE implementation is similarly attractive.
I await further developments with considerable interest.
Edit by Clem: Calling a spade a spade is what we ask for when we ask for “constructive feedback”, so don’t expect comments to be moderated because of that. If there are two or more links in your comment it’s possible it was automatically treated as spam, if there were insults or if you were aggressive or off-topic, then that could explain why your previous comment got removed (assuming it was). If it was your first comment, it’s probably simply held in moderation by the anti-spam (we’re using akismet here on this blog).
I just upgraded to Mint 12 today to try Cinnamon, and so far I’m pretty pleased. For me, Gnome 2 was just great, and if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it. I had a hard time finding advantages to Gnome 3 over Gnome 2 (and very few advantages of Unity over Gnome 2 or 3). Thanks for the nice work so far, guys.
Gnome Shell is… Gnome Shell… but it is really young, and i i’m not sure it will not become very usable one day.
MATE… well i think it is a courageous try and it works really nice for now. but i can’t see it living more than a couple of years. It will remain alive until major software migrate to GTK3. After that what will happen ? it is a huge work and a pain to maintain such a fork and it will become more and more difficult. All this work is dead end. @Clem : i don’t know much about developpement so i can’t really tell, but doesn’t MATE have the same future Gnome 2 have ?
Cinnamon is a better bet. It is sitting on a brand new base that is maintained and improved everyday.
Edit by Clem: A LOT of software still use GTK+, so it’s not going away anytime soon. Also, I’m writing to you from a Sony Vaio T2XP, and this little laptop uses an Intel 855GM chipset (which was the standard chipset in almost all laptops at the time)… as it happens, this chipset doesn’t have any 3D acceleration and is currently unable to run Gnome Shell or Cinnamon… so if it wasn’t for MATE, I wouldn’t be able to run Mint 12 on it. MATE is extremely important. It’s like everything when you do R&D, you try to do better, but you don’t forget what you already have.. Gnome 2 is the most popular Linux desktop by far, and the closest thing to Gnome 2 (for those who can’t run it) is MATE.
what about lxde 12 or lxde debian ?
all this new unities,plasmas and gnome shells are heavy and buggy
Thank you very much!
I would like to try this new DE out, but I have LMDE XFCE installed which I like very much.
Is there any LiveCD available to try it out?
Thank you
please update LMDE already, it is outdated(eg. old firefox)
LMDE has potential to be best linux distro out here, but it seems to be neglected.
LMDE is so good it takes under 150MB ram…….
Edit by Clem: Firefox and Thunderbird are being upgraded to 9.0.1 (it takes time to package, 900MB of locales basically, but we’re getting it done). For the Update Pack, you’ll have to wait for Debian Testing to get Gnome 3.2, or for us to find a way to make Cinnamon work with Gnome 3.0. Before that happens we’re not sending thousands of Gnome 2 users towards an update path which will change their desktop to Gnome 3.0 without being able to offer them some alternatives.
Cinnamon looks great. MATE never really convinced, neither Gnome 3.
I’m that with some, Clem would be able to make Gnome 3 useable. But why bother when there is Cinnamon. I had already read about it, but i never thought it would be ready so soon, let alone on Mint 12…
Gnome 2 is dead, no matter how we look at it. It served us well, but we must evolve. Evolving doesn’t necessarily means dropping all the hard work so far and starting over. Cinnamon manages to bring the important stuff in Gnome 2 with the technology of Gnome 3, and with actual usability improvements.
MATE might be good, and achieve some or even a lot of users. But, utimately i see Cinnamon being the #1 Linux Desktop in about 1~2 years.
A “theme” button on the desktop? o.O
Cinnamon looks cool. I may give it a try, but honestly I am quite happy with Gnome 3. I’m not sure why people hate on it so much.
No compiz support? Not good.
Compiz support is a necessity, especially for visually impaired individuals (Enhanced desktop Zoom). it’s shameful how those people have been sidelined by the new evolving interfaces. In the real world, that would be lawsuit material.
Clem for President!
i agree, compiz is a must have!
Looks like doing Cinnamon is a good choice and most people are happy Mint is putting in the effort. Played with it a little bit but I’m sticking with gnome 3 as I have gotten quite used to it and like it. Perhaps when Cinnamon matures I’ll look at it again.
To all the people who wants to get rid of the Icon at the top corner and or the hot corner and to add the auto hide this is how first you need to open terminal and install this ( sudo apt-get install dconf-tools ) then go to the menu and open( dconf editor )then go to ( org ) then click on ( cinnamon ) to get rid of the icon and hot corner or the overview-corner-hover = hot corner and the overview-corner-visible = icon panel-autohide is there to
I really like Cinnamon and the idea behind it. It seems to me, however, that the menu icons are small and the spaces between them are wide. Is it possible to make it more balanced?
I understand that 1.1.4 will be dealing with themes and configuration, (see 37,54, etc.) I can’t wait to see the next development of Cinnamon.
Congrats Clem and the Team.
Go best aroma, minty cinnamon!
I hated mint 12. And i wasn’t a big fan of 11 either. I was thinking of going back to ten but this won me over. Cinnamon is the best thing to happen to mint since 10
Hi im having troubles installing cinnamon heres what i did
eric@eric-TA870U3 ~ $ sudo aptitude install cinnamon-session
[sudo] password for eric:
The following NEW packages will be installed:
cinnamon{a} cinnamon-session
0 packages upgraded, 2 newly installed, 0 to remove and 6 not upgraded.
Need to get 846 kB of archives. After unpacking 3,338 kB will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n/?] y
Err http://packages.linuxmint.com/ lisa/main cinnamon amd64 1.1.2
404 Not Found
Get: 1 http://packages.linuxmint.com/ lisa/main cinnamon-session all 1.0.0 [1,634 B]
Fetched 1,634 B in 0s (6,328 B/s)
E: Failed to fetch http://packages.linuxmint.com/pool/main/c/cinnamon/cinnamon_1.1.2_amd64.deb: 404 Not Found
E: Failed to fetch http://packages.linuxmint.com/pool/main/c/cinnamon/cinnamon_1.1.2_amd64.deb: 404 Not Found
any help? im running Linux Mint 12 64bit
Update: I got it to iNstall i had to apt-get update first before i could get it.
It looks good, but what is the difference really between Gnome shell with MSGE and maybe a few more tweaks vs this new desktop? Isnt it essentially what we already have with Gnome Shell and MSGE?
If it was me, I would bring the infinity symbol into the other panel, and have 1 and ONLY 1 panel…..I always hated the dual panels in Ubuntu and liked Mint better with its more KDE like menu for gnome. 1 panel is better because then you can have a dock…..any chance of killing the top panel and bringing the infinity symbol into the new one?
It would also be nice to get some panel widgets like we had for Gnome 2. Gnome 2 with compiz still blows this out of the water, though this is way better than what Ubuntu is offering.
If I was going to go KDE, Id go Sabayon instead of Suse.
For those who are absolutely stuck on Gnome2 with Compiz, FusionOS is the best out there right now. Only in x32, but you can use the pae kernels….its the Mint of Fedora based distros.
Alternately, you could always use Mint 10, the last one that was stable and worked with Gnome2, and upgrade the kernel or compile a new one, then add the repositories for the specific apps you want…..Mint 10 works great with the new kernel. Just add a few repos and get newer apps, and its all good.
I ALMOST like the new Mint, but I wish it was all packed into the same panel.Id like there to be room for a dock.
I have upgraded to Mint 12 on my main desktop a couple of weeks ago. I have been using it ever since and loving it. I am very impressed with your work.
I just can’t understand why Mint is not mainstream in schools with kids, it’s depressing really. (I have never been disappointed by a Mint install or by the use of puppy linux on old computers)
I will try Cinnamon soon out of curiosity not necessity.
Thanks for your work
Denis
Hi Clem and Team,
I only can say: Bravo for the good ideas and showing a mature thinking regarding the Linux desktop. Definitely this will influence the Linux world for good.
All the best,
@Marjeo, Yes you can adjust the icon spacing. You have to tweak the theme css file to do it at this time. There is a tutorial in the forums to help with this. Some of the issues will be “adjusted” as more themes are created for Cinnamon.
@ Roj. As being one of those visually impaired (to the point of being legally blind) people myself, I can tell you that so far, for me anyway, not having compiz is not a problem. The default theme is hard for me to use but after my “adjusting” the theme (darker) its not a problem for me.
Here is my panel:
http://i634.photobucket.com/albums/uu70/crzen/Mint%2012%20cinnamon/Screenshotat2012-01-04001449.png
Hello , cinnamon looks very promissing, thanks again, it might be the future, giving more choises, letting us use any base system (fedora,arch etc)
What about present
LMDE didnot get any updates, for a long time, some forums consinder it is almost a dead project
Firefox is version 5 ( actually in v9), changing sources.list to debian/testing, I’m getting
“Need to get 717 MB of archives”
so please inform us
Thanks again but ubuntu needs much more resources than debian, arch ..
This is wrong, wrong, WRONG. The absolutely last thing Linux needs is yet another desktop environment … If you don’t like Gnome 3, use XFCE as default, or Mate, but for God’s sake don’t waste your time by reinventing the wheel all over again and again and again, wasting valuable development time that could easily be used elsewhere.
Well done Mint team! Your effort is remarkable…
beautiful and interesting work. will be interesting to see how the project develops.
Clem,
This is obviously a large task you are undertaking here and I wish you every success as I am one of the many people who are thrashing about trying to find a suitable replacement for Gnome 2, and failing to do so.
My requests would be: to ensure either Compiz compatibility or, if not, a means of ensuring application windows can open in the centre of the screen rather than the top left corner.
Secondly I would like panel applets, particularly the system monitor which I find extremely useful.
Regards,
Ruffian
Why do all these distros get snobby about the desktop ? I’ve flipped and flopped from gnome to kde and back again over the years….and I’m sticking to KDE for good unless they do something insane enough to move. Yeah I’ve tried plenty of other desktops too…..not worth worrying about IMO unless you’re on a pentium 1.
I’ve just today install linuxmint for the first time, and just saw this post when I launched the browser….I’m going back to debian, ubuntu and mint just don’t make sense for me.
@dimitrins(161)
Your questions regarding LMDE has been dealt with a number of times (or at least that how it seems to me) in various posts, but I suppose that the reason you missed it is that most people (as you are doing here) decide to start asking these questions in blog posts and forum threads that are quite unrelated. This post for example is talking about Cinnamon, but I’ve still read various posts talking about KDE 12, LXDE 12, LMDE making it quite difficult to track the information you’re looking for…
Come on people, is it really that hard to keep to the subject? (Yeah, I know – I’m kind of leaving the subject myself with this post)
Anyway – to answer your question:
If you’ve chosen to use the “version” of LMDE that uses the update packs tested/maintained by “The Mint Team” I believe it was said that these will start rolling again when Gnome 3.2 reaches testing, but still after the release of KDE & LXDE versions. Then on the other hand – if you’ve stayed with the version of LMDE following Debian Testing your list of suggested updates would not have been a list with 717MB of archives…
Don’t mind the “post number” above… it seems like there was an update with temporarily moderated “first time posters”…
My reply was still for dimitrins, even if the number got wrong.
Please, translate Cinnamon and other shell to RUSSIAN languages!
Good Work Mint team!
To be honest, after I try it i did get back on MGSE. Kind of got used on it, at least for my low-user needs.
but anyway congrats for trying something new and for your focus on development.
Nick@188
I believe Clem mentioned that panel configuration is going to increase in the near future. In other words, we should be able to put it anywhere we want, or maybe remove it for that matter. This has always been the case with the default Gnome 2 desktop. Many distros had it placed up top by default, but it was super simple to drop it to the bottom, left, right, etc. Mint simply put it on the bottom by default and added their own menu layout, which was also easy to change. In short, one of the key things people miss about Gnome 2 is due to that very thing. You could do whatever you wanted with panels. That is currently not the case with Gnome 3 as I’m sure you know by now.
In reference to comment 187, I have to agree with you. On the surface it doesn’t look like much has changed. But I personally have found it far more seamless, and it has much less of a bolt-on feel than with MGSE. MGSE is great work, but Clem’s approach to this issue is well explained in his introduction to Cinnamon. And we are going to be in for far more changes as time passes. The key is that instead of trying to introduce extensions compatible with Gnome 3, Clem has actually forked Gnome 3 and is now able to make Gnome 3 compatible with whatever direction he wants to take. With this approach, the sky is virtually the limit.
From my perspective, this is cause for all the excitement–at least for me. Clem has truly taken the bull by the horns. Sorry for that corny cliche, but I feel it truly describes Clem’s commitment.
All we have to do is be patient, and see what develops. At the very least, Clem has got far more control at his fingertips. My only concern is that–with this–there are far more opportunities to break things–and sometimes big things. But Clem has proven that he is more than capable, come what may.
Trevor@197
Amen! I admire your position. For myself, I love Mint for my own reasons. Obviously you don’t share those sentiments. But I’m not going to argue with you as to why my reasons are better than yours, because that’s just stupid, and a matter of opinion. But like other posters, I certainly appreciate you not using this blog to complain, but rather to simply move on to what works best for you. KDE is a wonderful environment and completely useful, and I personally can’t wait to see Mint’s KDE release. Anyway, have fun with Debian.
Clem –
Kudos and many thanks for your hard work (you and the rest of the team) trying to wrangle GNOME 3 into a desktop you feel is the right one for Mint. I stick with Mint precisely because you make all these decisions that are user-focused. You guys are doing the best you can with the options you have, and working very hard in a short time.
I’m sure Cinnamon will steadily improve; the short time I tried it was quite a pleasant experience. The reasons you gave for deciding to go with this new project make sense to me, and I’m sure that you and the team would not have taken this on if you didn’t think you had the ability to see it through.
Yeh, Cinnamon looks similar to MGSE. But in MGSE/ Gnome3 you cann’t add any shortcuts to desktop or to say in panel. No right click menu. For some basic things and panel applets, we are forced to get it done through extensions via PPAs. More extensions, more problems. If some applets start working, problems comes in other. Many users asked Clem in earlier blog to get rid of top panel. See the result. With Cinnamon all these problems are solved. Of course its gon’na better with time.
@ Ruffian at 196 : You can add any applets by right clicking it to the panel. Just search system monitor (or any applet you want to add) in the Mint Menu and add it to the panel. And sorry, if you meant something else.
Where is unplug flash?? In Nautilus it remove not save, but on desktop in right corneal display was applet from i can safe remove flash drive. Wehr she now? Create you own applet to disconnect flash driver in system try please!
i hope this new desktop works better than the last two offerings i.e. default in mint 11 & 12
for me mint 11 & 12 have lost focus when dragging and dropping movie files in to an open movie player window usually happens at around 30ish
it usually leaves me with the dragging mouse icon and won’t drop even though the movie dropped into the player and is playing.
also had the problem dragging and dropping lots of files from one window to another.
can’t regain control tried on several pc’s same result, downloaded and burned & tested several disks the same
still using mint 10 works fine
will try 12 with cinnamon
Is this supposed to be released for 64-bit Linux Mint yet? Installing “cinnamon-session” appeared to work (I didn’t get the 404 errors that others are reporting).
However, when I select a Cinnamon session during login, it doesn’t look anything like the screenshots I’ve seen. I looks and functions exactly like MATE.
Fantastic work giving people a choice other than KDE (which in my opinion is the only currently viable mainstream Linux desktop environment) in a highly integrated distribution.
Unity and Gnome3/Gnome Shell are still very much a work in progress train wreck, unsuitable for novice OR advanced users. This may be opinion, but it’s very widely shared opinion. LXDE and Xfce are not modern or polished enough. MGSE is swimming against the prevailing current.
I’m sure Gnome3/Gnome Shell/Unity will be fantastic once we’re all running on low resolution pads using our fists, elbows or knees for navigation, but for a powerful desktop with multiple graphics cards, monitors and a pixel perfect pointing device it’s just the wrong direction.
The old desktop metaphor simply works 1337 times better, and the more distributions focus on the desktop choice the better.
Clem, if you happen to read this post – you mentioned Cinnamon takes 60-75MB, is that after machine restart? If so, it’s great news, since it would be quite close to (Flux/Open)box with the eye candy/features added.
Also your new approach of replying on individual posts itself is good 🙂 earlier had to navigate back and forth to find out what the issue/query was v/s your reply.
Great work!!
This is very nice,professional and easy to use.
thanks a lot.
It’s pretty nice. I definitely appreciate what you’re going for here. Sadly, I can’t really use it, due to the same issues with ATI/AMD drivers that plague Gnome shell (if there is a fix other than using open source drivers, I haven’t heard of it yet).
Looks like I’ll be sticking with Xfce still. Not that it’s a problem, of course.
Absolutely fantastic.
Mint is about usability and ease of configuration.
Many thanks, Clem.
very nice desktop, better than gnome shell and unity
What a great project! Thanks to the Mint team for introducing Cinnamon. Very much look forward to following its progress. I’m not surprised though, the Mint Team is always ahead of the pack when it comes to innovation and most importantly, listening to its users.
¡¡¡¡¡¡¿¿¿¿¿Pero es que jamás nos libraremos de Gnome 2??????!!!!
MGSE es el camino.
Cinnamon is very nice. I look forward to seeing it mature as a desktop option. Mostly, I just really appreciate the LM team providing us good options for desktops as we get through this Gnome transition. If someone is not a fan of any of the options available so far, Gnome3+MGSE, Mate, or Cinnamon, then I would recommend trying out Xfce. Combined with the other niceties of LM12, Xfce comes across very well.
Fantastic!!!…. Thank you MINT!!…. Cinnamon is just wonderful…
It’s amazing what Team Mint continues to accomplish in such a short timespan. I’m still shocked that Cinnamon is in its Alpha stages because it works quite well.
I have been playing with this on Ubuntu in a VM for the past few days. I saw it mentioned on Facebook I had no idea it was made by Mint. I feel like such a retard lol.
Great job guys, for me it’s perfect. It is everything I want in a desktop.
Does Cinnamon resolve the problem with the ATI Radeon Mobility M6 video and if so has it been added to the DVD iso ?
Edit by Clem: Cinnamon features the same compatibility as Gnome Shell, and no respins of Mint 12 were planned/made so far.
Love it.
I hope we will have available extensions that manage notifications and alt+tab functionality.
Keep up the good work.
Peace!
Edit by Clem: Alt+Tab is window-centric in Cinnamon (unlike Gnome Shell), and notifications in Cinnamon are quite similar to those of Gnome 2 (still a few bugs in that particular area of Cinnamon, but we’re 90% there).
Cinnamon is AWESOME. I love the look and feel of it. I actually had a TON of trouble with gnome 3 and mate and I’ve had zero issues with cinnamon. I promise you I’m being genuine when I say that this is the first time in 3+ years of using Linux that I’ve ever tried a new desktop on 10+ different distros and never had an issue. Usually I run into a massive amount of issues and have to come up with some stupid workarounds to get my work done and to get things to just function normally. Not so with cinnamon(so far anyway). I am truly gobsmacked.
Cinnamon is very nice ..good job.
Does gnome shell themes work with it?..I tried change the theme to other gnome-shell themes but the panel is distorted.
Anyway ..congratulations and thanks 🙂
Edit by Clem: They do.. but they’re incomplete because they don’t define styles for specific features of Cinnamon… so the best thing is to wait for Cinnamon to mature and for new Cinnamon themes to emerge and Gnome shell themes to get ported properly to cinnamon.
The BEST since sex and Coca Cola!!!!!!
Keep up the good work Clem
Regards
Alwyn de Waal
Republic of South Africa
The menu points out squares instead.
OK, so we’ve got Gnome3, Gnome shell, MATE, Cinnamon… What else are we going to see in the next few months? With all that mess it’s hard to recommend LM12 Main Edition to anybody who is not a geek.
Why not change the Main Edition’s DE to something more stable and predictable like XFCE 4.8, which is closer to classic Gnome2 than G3 and KDE and start a project labeled Mint Testing Edition or similar dedicated to polishing Gnome3?
Cinnamon е пного добрър. само не знам защо в началното меню вместо букви излизат квадратчета. може ли това да се оправи?
It`s great. But there is still some problems with themes
Hi
Really, great job. I appreciate your work. Cinnamon will soon definitely be one of the big WM’s. I think LXDE and Mate won’t stand a chance.
man this cinnamon rocks!!!!!!!!! i used to hate ubuntu cuz of unity. i decided to switch to LMDE but now u made cinnamon and how u arrange gnome 3 i love it ! im back to ubuntu with linux mint 12 all the way !
is there a way i can help developing something for u clem or to test or do anything for u ?
@teegoat: very simple…because most of us here prefer GNOME….including Clem i am sure…not XFCE, KDE or whatever….lol
Also, it should be fairly obvious that Cinnamon is going to be the main and default for Mint 13….although of course, one will have the option of logging into the other sessions as well…Here at Mint it is all about choice….something unfortunately one does not get over at Ubuntu…
Cinnamon is fabulous already and will continue to get even better as more features and easy configuring is added into it….
Note to Clem: I hope future versions of Cinnamon will include a bunch of nice optional themes that we can select from…the default theme is nice but some of those outside designers options would be great to have available too…
It’s amazing…since you have added Cinnamon i am enjoying my Mint 12 more then ever…in fact, it’s the ONLY session i have been logging into…absolutely love how it looks and works…keep it up and keep it coming (lol) !!!
I’m using it right now and still have to wonder why GNOME 3 is, in the developer’s opinion, “better.” I have pretty much abandoned recommending Ubuntu to my friends, since Mint does everything so much better.
I tried this out a few days ago and it’s alright, but doesn’t seem wildly different from the stock Gnome 3 included with Mint 12. I’m still ecstatic that when you download Cairo-dock there is now a option to login as a cairo-dock session that elimitates the need for panels all together! I love that it gives me edge to edge screen realty! Cinnamon is a nice alternative, but the Cairo-dock session is where it’s at for me! Love all the progress on Mint, keep up the good work!
Anyone know why the icons in the panel all bunch together with very little space when using any theme other than the default? Is there a simple way to fix this? I have some very nice themes but don’t like icons bunched together. Thank you in advance.
@Craig: Please do not profess to speak for the rest of us. I use Mint but prefer KDE over Gnome 2/3 or whatever.
Patiently waiting for MINT KDE.
Continued from 232: I know Clem said to wait, but I thought I saw someone say we could put spaces in.
teegoat@226
I understand your frustration. However, while the other desktops are quite usable, many users simply prefer Gnome because of what it became. It was simple and effective, and plenty configurable, and it looked clean, without being plain Jane. But out of the box, the Gnome developers have made some changes that appear to be heading in a different direction. We won’t say whether it is right or wrong. Nevertheless, this has resulted in a magnificent controversy, as is quite obvious. People simply want back what was removed from the default Gnome experience, with the option to change things around to their liking without having to go to school for it. It wasn’t broken at all, rather it was the result of years of development to make it as good as possible. And it really was good.
Gnome 3 does have some remarkable capabilities that are seldom commented on, but Clem knows it, and this is perhaps just one reason for the steps that he has taken. In Clem’s own words, or similar ones at least, it is simply the fact that Gnome 3 is highly scriptable and with the source code, you can pretty much make it do anything you want. But you have to have the source code.
That being said, it is my opinion and obviously the opinion of a growing number, that Cinnamon offers the most promise by far, that one day Gnome will at least be as configurable as we would like it to be. This is because Clem has acquired the Gnome source and forked it into his own project, rather than trying to make extensions like MGSE work with a DE that he has no control over. In other words, if you can’t get the Gnome crowd to do what you want them to do, grab the source code and do it yourself. And while MATE is getting better and better, you have to wonder where it’s going to end up. After all, it’s vision is to perform CPR on old source code that’s brain dead if you will pardon the analogy. How far can we expect that to get? It remains to be seen. That’s it in a nutshell.
This has far reaching implications and will probably be one of the most exciting developments in open source to date. Even if you are a KDE fan or a fan of some other DE, you simply can not ignore what’s going on right now in the Gnome 3 realm–love it or hate it.
This is very good news and looks good. I really do not like the Gnome 3 way of things and cannot stand too much novelty.
@ PB – Great post, well said.
much respect for Cinnamon. a very promising project and DE, a very correct direction to go. it seems to me gnome 3 will be totally usable in mint 13 =) i will even leave my current kde distro for it =)
mint rocks as always, and always chooses the right path. bravo.
Interesting direction with Cinnamon. Probably won’t try it out until it has forked enough away from the horrible memories I have of Gnome Desktop 3.x. Next big improvement: unhitch Mint’s star from the Ubuntu horse — that horse is foaming at the mouth and galloping towards a cliff. Better a Debian base than Mint, I say.
I second that….very well put PB…a very good explanation of what has been going on and where it is heading over here at LM…
What do you mean, you ‘lost’ Gnome 2?
It’s still available on your previous versions of Mint, can’t you reverse engineer it from one of those distros and then use it again in new issues of Mint?
Everyone hates Gnome 3, so if you refuse to use it and go back to using Gnome 2 from the previous issues, eventually the idiots that make 3 will realise that no one wants it and will knuckle down to making Gnome 2 again!
@gerhardy….i know mint has it’s kde fans too….lol…i said most of us not all of us…lol…which actually is a reasonable statement when you look at the mint usage breakdown…75% main edition gnome 10% additional for LMDE and about another 10% KDE…and so forth…and of course, LMDE is gnome so that is 85% of mint users…
So again…most of us is not an unreasonable statement…didn’t mean to offend…and while lmde doesn’t have cinnamon yet, it will as soon as gnome 3.2 becomes available for it through debian…
Clem:
I have (on Mint12 x64) installed the cinnamon-session package.
However when I try to login, I do not see the cinnamon option.
I rebooted and tried a few things: no success.
Any idea, suggestion?
Note: I have already installed (and it works) the qt-razor login.
Could it be that there is a maximum number of login shells?
André
@Mark Adams:243
That’s the point of LMDE. The only thing that’s really sticking from Ubuntu is repos, which for better or worse, many apps not in the standard repos on the web only have compatibility with Ubuntu and not Debian. While I will agree Debian is a more stable system the whole way around, it’s not really the answer for the mass public. But what do you do now that Mint is the most popular distro, and it’s based on 2 less popular distos? I think it’s more about app designers getting onboard and releasing their binaries as a Mint package(whatever that may become), and leave Ubuntu and Debian completely in the dust!
Love the choices being offered. One suggestion. A strength of the gnome 3 shell (in my opinion) is the gnome-do functionality of the start key with application launching plus web search plus wikipedia. Hopefully this functionality can be integrated as a user option in cinnamon down the road either as part of the menu or the hot corner. Thanks for all your efforts.
Clem:
any plan to do for Red-Hat and derivatives (Fedora, CentOS etc…) what you did for Ubuntu/Debian.
Because for software developers, Red Hat, Fedora based Linux is hard to replace. For lots of reasons. (tools, repos, reliability, RPM, kernel, etc…)
But the Red-Hat based distros could use a Mint userś experience, with easy drivers install (Nvidia, Broadcom in my case), etc…
Thanks,
Andre
Awesome Cant wait to see it finished, It look great for now. Nice a fast.
Hi,
I have two monitors and have programs on both those monitors obviously, I would love to see that the menu can be stretched to the second monitor and whatever programs that’s on the second one show up only in the menu bar in that screen. That would be awesome
anyhow, i am waiting for new LMDE-…..it should be priority on linuxmint road-map, because that is true mint on Debian, otherwise it will always be ubuntu variant.
Rolling distro ftw
I use Cinnamon daily and I enjoy it.
The program gnome-gmail-notifier does not appear in the Cinnamon panel, only in notification, which is not enough.
Which is the recommended gmail notifier for Cinnamon?
@ roger64 – I’ve been using CheckGmail with Mint 12 since the start and it works fine with Cinnamon.
Is there a way to configure mint menu ? I want to remove Debian menu (I don’t know why it is there).
CTRL+A doesnt work with text (in firefox and in gedit also for example). How to configure gnome keyboard shortcuts ?
Or the g-conf editor only helps?
Sry about keyboard shortcut question. I found it on system settings – really cool. Configuring taskbar and mint menu comes after development? I dont want to use that slow kde 4 (quad core machine- but still slow).
All of my family and clients use compiz. The most useful and really only needed feature there is left clicking on the left side of the screen to zoom out to all virtual desktops. This is great because we can use a virtualized OS in full screen mode (pretty common) and still zoom out to linux desktop when needed.
Please either consider this a feature of Cinnamon or allow compiz as others are asking for.
Will Cinnamon ever be offered to users who don’t have or don’t want 3D graphics support?
@Bill 251
checkgmail works badly for me with Cinnamon (background icon, password problem..) while it was my preferred gmail utility with gnome2.And gnome-mail-notifier does not appear in systray.
So my question is still standing:
Is there a recommended gmail notifier for Cinnamon?
If the Mint Team can make the Mint Menu in Cinammon look and feel exactly like it does in Gnome 2x, then I will be sold. Still, the advantage of MATE is that it won’t use up the kind of resources that Cinammon will.
Clem
Whilst it is welcomed that you and the team appear to be addressing some of the current shortcomings of MATE with the introduction of Cinnamon it has to be said for the prospective Mint user it has complicated the situation even further with another Desktop Environment option available.
The question surely needs to be asked as to what the future direction of Mint is with regards to Desktop Environments as I feel it is time for some clarity.
This is not negative input so please do not take as such.
Thanks for the Linux Mint team for taking the time and effort to bring us such a clean and nice-looking desktop! 🙂
@ roger64 – There is a fix for the password problem and if you are interested, I’ll explain it. Here you see it working fine in my panel:
https://backup.filesanywhere.com/FS/M.aspx?v=917066899b9ea5baaa9e
Of course if you are not interested, then have a nice day and good luck.
My wife can find the off button again! “Yes hon, it’s back in the lower left corner again.” It’s the little things that help.
@Guy…Cinnamon is really the way to go for Gnome desktop environment on Mint now and going forward…while apparently Clem will continue to offer the options of mate and gnome 3 shell w/without MGSE as optional sessions you can log into, Cinnamon will be the main session for LM….
Unlike the others, it obviously has the advantage of being a more familiar and easy to use desktop and yet takes advantages of all the new technology offered by Gnome 3 underneath…
And it also has the advantage of being more stable then MGSE (or gnome 3 shell) w/extensions as well as the ability to offer easy configuring right within it, without having to add outside 3rd party extensions…
Perhaps Clem will jump on here and give his own person explanation but i believe that is basically it in a “nutshell” as it were…
I think what he has achieved here is to uncomplicate the DE situation and not complicate it…He could really drop the others as they won’t really be necessary anymore but i guess he wants to offer the maximum options to the mint community so they can use whatever they most feel comfortable with…
Oh and as far as MATE is concerned….well i know he is continue to continue with it but i think it’s future is less secure because it is a fork of gnome 2 which may ultimately be difficult to maintain…meanwhile Cinnamon will have no such problem since it is totally compatible with gnome 3 and the new technology…
Guy@257
While Clem hasn’t said verbatim that Cinnamon is the dawn of the new main edition, I think we can read between the lines. Is it really that unclear? Perhaps I’ve totally misunderstood what Clem has posted.
In any case, the whole Gnome 3 travesty is what it is. We would be foolish to think that there isn’t going to be some sort of fallout–large or small. Guy, how quickly we forget the past several months of blogging about this massive catastrophe! Besides, for what it’s worth, it’s my gut instinct that we are past the worst of it. But only time will tell.
It’s my opinion that what may seem to be a source of confusion for some is the very least of Clem’s concerns right now. I’m sure he has given it due consideration, but it’s simply a matter of prioritizing. In other words, if Clem’s immediate mission is to get Cinnamon on it’s feet and in the running for Mint Main Edition, and better yet, if he is reasonably successful in accomplishing that mission, then what of it? For the sake of argument, we will call this hodgepodge of DE’s collateral damage. With the big picture clearly in focus, however, it is minimal at worst.
One of the most profound and simplest truths about people is you can’t please everybody. But as profound and simple as that is, it seems to be one of the most forgotten.
That being said, when trying to quantify the efforts of Clem or someone in a similar position, we would be remiss if we didn’t include that truth in the equation.
On a lighter note, I found it somewhat comical that people were getting the news about Cinnamon well before Clem posted it on the Mint site. But after giving it some thought, it simply highlights to me that Clem has a finite approach to breaking the news. On the other hand, he may have simply forgotten. LOL!!
Any chance this will be available for LM 11? I’ve tried everything but not finding it or installing.
Sorry, but ATI drivers are not very compatible with Gnome 3 and Cinnamon, the screen appears with curious lines and some letters don’t appear. The same problem happends with OpenSuse or other distros. The firts thing is to resolve this compatibility problem, but ATI drivers are not Open Source.
Edit: Using the latest Catalyst drivers (11.12 I think, from the ATI website) you can run both Cinnamon and Gnome Shell.
Soo cool,
I feel like using linux mint again. MINT 12 KDE also sounds good.
Thanks
@ PB..yes i think you are right that he hasn’t specifically said that it will be the default of mint 13 but just going on the basis of the massive positive reaction to it, both in the Linux Mint Community as well as users of other major distros like Open Suse, Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch, etc…who already have access to it, i’d say the “handwriting is already on the wall as it were”…LOL
Even though i have access on my Mint 12 to MGSE, gnome 3 shell basic, Mate and all i have found that since i started using Cinnamon that it has been the only session i have been logging into…i’m sure others are having the same experience…it’s not even complete yet…and yet it already just “feels right”…
Translating post #227 from Bulgarian to English:
Cinnamon is very good. However I don’t know why in the start menu, instead of letters, little squares appear. Can that be fixed?
Edit by Clem: If you’re using an ATI card, try the latest Catalyst drivers (11.12) from the ATI website.
@Bill-259 : Your desktop looks great.
@PB : Your two post above one to teegoat@226 and other to Guy@257 are great. One thing is sure, at least in this birth/ life I am not gon’na write like you.
@PB : Again on the lighter note, some of us perhaps @Craig also (If I read above clearly) not only we just got the news of Cinnamon earlier, but we also started using the Cinnamon before the Clem posted it here. Some Ubuntu users started using it in Ubuntu itself, before Clem posted it here. So as Mint users how can we stay behind, or do we? Anyway, good night.
@Craig : Although I said good night to @PB but while posting it post got refreshed and I read your post. You are right. I know some users who at the start used only MATE and were feeling alienated towards MGSE. But in due course they started using MGSE and started liking it. And now they are liking Cinnamon. Now most of them are not using MATE. I should frankly say including me. Now I myself don’nt want to use MGSE or MATE. Interestingly in the last blog when I asked @Guy about his experience with Mint-12 he said he is using MGSE (@Guy please donn’t mind, its not a secret and hope you might now be enjoying Cinnamon). So, Yeh Cinnamon even in its early stage is better than MGSE and MATE. Experience same.
I’m almost feeling like LMDE has become an afterthought, I can understand the
wait for Gnome 3.2 but the lack of other updates makes one wonder.
@bobby…yeah that sure seems to be the case for many hear now….Cinnamon has kind of become the “top dog” already (lol)…
@Rich…I stopped using lmde some time ago and back on main edition…but although i understand your frustration about not getting a new update pack it’s not because it’s an “after thought” i believe there are technical reasons because Clem wants you to avoid major problems and breakages…
once debian testing has gnome 3.2 then he can add in everything properly, including your additional “sessions” options (including cinnamon) and the updates should much more smoothly (all the updates) then if you started grabbing them now…
it’s an unusual situation which would normally not be present…otherwise i have no doubt you would have got your update pack a long time ago…but there is a lot of radical “technical changes” going on here now…
apologize for errors in some of my sentences in the comments…i should proofread better…lol anyway that is my last comment…carry on….i will be on the “sidelines” now…
@ bobby who wrote, “Your desktop looks great.”
Thank you, I had a nice theme for the panel but it bunches icons
to close together, so I am using Cinnamon default theme until new ones are developed.
Though making a conventional-style desktop with a more up-to-date underpinning a good thing, I am not changing from LMDE XFCE.
I am much more happy that Clem has finally given a rough timeframe for when we can expect the next LMDE update pack (even if it sounds like it will still be a few more months).
I keep my fingers crossed for Clem and LM. The Linux world is so split up and divided…THE Desktop, as well as functionality, are at the heart of the entire issue…when Billy introduced mouse and GUI, home computing entered a new era. Still today, the desktop is the decisive ingredient.
Gnome 3 was introduced too hastily, I feel. It has a totally good feel to it, that’s good, but functionality and intuitiveness were left behind. Mate is good but it is sort of “hanging off” to the side, but it works!
So lets see! I hope Clem and the team strike it big with Cinnamon, could be, that everyone will come running to LM! Wouldn’t that be our day in the sun.
I think this is a step in the WRONG direction.
I just installed GNOME 2 + Compiz on LMDE. It is beautiful, perfect, easy to use. It reminded me what a total waste of a good desktop GNOME 3 is.
You should focus on MATE instead and contribute to it so that it becomes the new defacto Linux desktop instead of propagating GNOME 3.
Sorry, but Cinnamon is second rate compared to what we already have : GNOME 2 + GNOME Do + Compiz
Finally, we’re getting rid of the upper panel. I hope MGSE will be phased out soon.
Actually, about 110 and it’s multiple replies, Unity Can be installed in other distros as long as you have Gnome Shell instead of Gnome 2 and your distro is Ubuntu compatible; For example, I managed to install Unity in Mint 12 using aptitude and it works as… Well, it works as well as Unity can, so… Not all that well. The point is that even though it is hard to aknowledge Unity as an UI and I agree it is very restrictive, it is not all that bad and it can get better with enough time; Look what Mint did with Gnome 3 and Cinnamon. It is just a matter of time until somebody else gets his/her hands on “fixing” Unity and makes Ubuntu a better distro.
I think this is the reazon why free and open source software is all that important: It is about choice. More importantly, it is about sharing, and Gnome 3 as well as Unity share their code. If you don’t like it, Fork! That is the principle that has gotten Linux so far and that is the principle that brought us such an incredible UI as is Cinnamon. Clem, you have done a Great Job forking Gnome 3 and I hope others join your cause or (since it is about choice) choos to have a cause of their own. We do not have to settle with everything Mainstream software has to offer. After one aknowledges that, it is easier to realize that, although thing aren’t quite perfect and we will all miss Gnome 2, it is time to move forward and choose the path that helps us get an UI as we prefer it.
I think time will tell; that is about as much as I can say.
I thought this was the best thing I’ve read about in ages. I’ve installed it on my Mint12VM’s – and hot engineering hell!
Everything is there but nothing works! I’m guessing this is due to running in a VM but I can’t even find it in the OpenSUSE repositories where it’s supposed to be available….
Guess I’m going to have to wait for the Mint13 to show it’s face….
Any chance we will see an option to add panels, maybe a port of the application/places/system menu. ability to add and remove stuff like gnome 2 had
I am absolutely loving Cinnamon. Clem has done an exceptional job and this desktop will be better than gnome 2 when Mint 13 is released. Here is my desktop right now:
http://i42.tinypic.com/rc4p45.jpg
Is it possible to have a LiveUSB with Cinnamon as default DE ?
I have loved mint12, and I have also liked your new cinnamon desktop and am using it now. I think what finally causes one to settle on a desktop is its reliability and I see your path toward cinnamon as a path toward a reliable and effective desktop. I am looking forward also to your experiments with KDE4 but in the end all said and done most of us want a desktop experience where we don’t lose work, we know how to use it, and when new features are added they truly add to the functionality in a way that we can easily adapt to it.
You are doing and have always done a fantastic job.
@Bill 264 about gmail notifiers
As I am an absolute fan of Cinnamon and do not wish to clutter this fine thread, I opened a new thread about it on the Mint forum. I would love to hear your advice to give me back checkgmail.
Here: http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=47&t=90999
Unity is horrible. GNOME is now pretty awful, too. This is too quickly similar to MATE.
My own conclusion? I’m not liking anything about these. I should’ve installed Xubuntu. I put Xfce on here, but it’s so borked by the tons of crap GNOME spewed into it…
@ roger64 – okay, I posted the solution over there.
I appreciate your work, thx!!!
But saddly I can’t enjoy on my freshly dist-upgraded 11.10 all I get is an ugly Gnome3 session when I log with session “Cinnamon”. I’m using lightdm and have installed the 1.13 deb’s from github. I already purge’d and reinstalled two or three times!!!
Hope you have a advice?
Greetz
Mircsicz
Perhaps it’s just me, but I am getting nowhere with Cinnamon. I first download the 32bit .iso and installed it on Parallels Tools 7 for Mac. It worked fine using the Gnome shell. But then I saw the post about Cinnamon so I wanted to give it a try. I downloaded Cinnamon desktop and cinnamon-session. When I logged out to log back in on Cinnamon I had no bottom bar and virtually nothing appeared when clicking on the infinity icon. Gnome does not work properly now either. Can anybody help?
For clarification the .iso I downloaded and installed was Mint 12.
Linux Mint, I am disappointed in your decision.
I switched to Linux Mint because you were extending, not replacing Gnome Foundation’s work in Gnome Shell. Now, you are doing basically the same thing Mark Shuttleworth did.
Many (most?) of the features you list are found in the bottom panel. One answer to the problems you point to in Gnome Shell would be to create a bottom panel package, similar to Docky. With a separate package we could keep using Gnome Shell and augment it. Now there is a new fork, where there doesn’t have to be.
Another solution would be to create an additional way to use Gnome Shell Extensions, for instance called Gnome Shell Advanced Extensions. This would have kept the hard work of GS extension writers, and would have saved the Mint team from developing their own Shell.
Instead, we have a Linux Mint “Unity”.
Looks fantastic
Answer to post 270 : last ATI drivers are a little better but not fully functionnal, there are still curious windows wrapping effects, they are not usable.
Other infos : ATI drivers seems to be designed for RedHat and OpenSuse distros…
Wuao, now I’m starting to feel at home again. One thing, after I add an app to my favorites in the Menu, I cant arrange them, they seems to be locked.
@ Rich Hunn
With regards to LMDE not recieving updates this can only be seen as a good thing being that LMDE is not slipping further in to Gnome 3. Any regressions so far have been easily addressed but future instances will be more difficult if not impossible.
Do what I have done and delete all the Linux Mint repositories from LMDE and replace them with Debian Squeeze and it gives greater control as to what is installed if like myself wanting to continue using Gnome 2
Changing the subject slightly is there any way Canonical could be convinced to offer extended support for Ubuntu 11.04 so Mint 11 would benefit.
I am too a little disappointed to see this fork as, IMHO, there are already far TOO MANY choices in the Linux ecosystem. But well. you are of course entitled to do what you feel is preferable.
Meanwhile, I also got used to GS (after being as enemy for quite some time). I also got used to Unity (rough edges are still a problem though). I am sure Cinnamon will be a good transition but I wonder if a new split is a good thing. How will you sync with the progressed made in the shell ?
Are you sure there was no way to cooperate with the GS team in order to make extensions more suitable for what you had in mind ? Didn’t you make the decision in a hurry ?
Well, anyway : keep up the great work. I am sure you will remain open in the future, if other choices have to be made. Definitely looking forward to Gnome 3 in LMDE !
Oh BTW, while you are at it (keeping and improving the G2 desktop paradigm) I am one of those who would absolutely LOVE a return of the old “Applications / Places / System” menus. I think they are extremely efficient, I really dislike the KDE or Windows like menus. Matter of personal preference 🙂
@ Mahen
I am a little puzzled as to why you are wishing the poison of Gnome 3 on LMDE given the trouble it has caused to Mint 12 !
It simply doesn’t make sense.
@ Guy : you’re probably right : there no hurry to switch right now if there is no satisfactory solution yet. But the switch will have to be done sooner or later, as Gnome 2 is “dead” anyway…
@ Clem : I have one more question 🙂 Do you plan to support the APIs introduced in Unity (and if I remember well, that are supported by KDE too or at least, I’m sure I heard about some cooperation on some levels) ? (ayatana notifications, “gauges” and “numbers” in the icons, indicators, etc. ?)
Mahen@302
I don’t want to over simplify what Clem is doing with the Cinnamon project, because it will certainly require a careful approach to how he chooses to modify the Gnome 3 source code. In fact, I made a comment in an earlier post, that modifying the code opens up more opportunities for breakage.
However, I am still at a loss as to why several users aren’t more confident that Cinnamon is really the best thing that Clem could do for the community. He has the entire Gnome Shell source code to do what he wants with. He doesn’t have to worry about whether or not extensions work with Gnome 3 so much. He can simply modify the code in such a way that the Gnome Shell experience will do what we want natively. Again, it is a significant undertaking, but in the end, it has the greatest chance of really making Gnome work for disgusted users like us. We can have the new technology that Gnome 3 is fully capable of, and the best part is, we can actually enjoy using it again.
I said it before, and I will say it yet again: Gnome 3, in all it’s ugliness, is a remarkable advancement at heart. Most users like myself, just don’t know how to unlock it. On the other hand, I don’t think Clem would have taken such a step if he didn’t think it would greatly increase his control over the product, and actually unlock it for us. So what if there are a few too many choices right now? I’m sure Clem has learned volumes about this whole mess, but at the same time, do we honestly think that it could have gone a lot better? Ever since Mint’s inception, there has been criticism about Mint riding on the backs of geniuses. But now look whose jumping on the Cinnamon project?
Cinnamon is going to take some time because of what’s at stake, but I feel confident that we are going to see really solid progress.
Guy@304
I apply some of the above comment to you as well, but more importantly, don’t be surprised if we see things really slow down with LMDE. My guess is that if and when Cinnamon becomes the main edition, and you and I actually become tickled with the results, then Clem will start to port Cinnamon to LMDE.
I ask: If Cinnamon becomes all it’s cracked up to be, and it includes the features that you and I both want, what on earth would be the harm in porting those changes to LMDE? Remember, that hypothetically, Cinnamon will possibly have turned Gnome 3 into a completely unrecognizable, yet completely useful DE. Maybe I’m just dreaming, but on the realistic side, no one can fault Clem for taking on greater responsibility.
@PB : what you say definitely makes sense.
My only actual worry is : will Clem manage to develop Cinnamon and at the same time, benefit from the work done in the further Shell versions ? Will he manage to do it in a way it remains easily maintainable ?
My fear is to see if become a real fork, considering all the effort done by the Gnome Shell team. If it can still share most of the code base, then, I think it can be a good thing.
Well, if more and more users join Mint and donate, maybe he can hire more people to work on this.
Cinnamon desktop will revolutionise Linux Desktop environment.Have installed Cinnamon on my laptop and it is working great…My request to clem is to concentrate on Cinnamon and make it the best desktop available for Linux machines rather than including mate, msge, gnome shell and gnome classic in a single installation…
Thanx again for the spicy cinnamon, and the upcoming Linux Mint 13 will rock the Linux World !!!
Is Linus watching ????????
Clem,
I wanted to say thank you. You have taken Gnome 3, which had sent me away from LM, to try other distros, and brought me back.
Suddenly LM 12 feels comfortable again.
Now if we can just get a compiz like program running again to make windows users jealous of the eye candy.
1 big bug remains. Only KDE fixed it – locked screen sometimes crashes and has some screen artifacts. Only terminal command :
sudo killall Xorg
fixes it…
Hi Clem!
Let me say that you all have developed a real linux replay to the ongoing DE situation. … freedom of thought and action is still possible… at least in the linux world
Regards
@ m_h_n @ PB (and many others)
The quote ‘Gnome 2 is dead’ keeps cropping up time and again but what all fail to recognize is none of these new Desktop Environments are anywhere near as stable.
It seems Clem and the team are doing their utmost to bring something to the Desktop which is acceptable and it is most appreciated but I fear it will be some time until Gnome3/MGSE and Cinnamon are anywhere close to Gnome 2
Clem and the team should distance themselves from MATE as its not fit to go on a Linux Mint Desktop.
Remember that #1 spot has now been achieved so from hereon in tread with care as the ice is thin.
There is one thing I have learnt of Linux users down the years and that is they are fickle.
Ever since Gnome 3 hit the stage on Linux desktops, I have been struggling to find a new desktop! I tried KDE, LXDE, Xfce, etc and had decided to switch to Xfce as my main Desktop. Then I read this very post and I began to change my mind!
This new project is only but one example of how Clem and the Linux Mint team continues to bring us beautiful and useful desktops! Although Cinnamon is not quite done yet. it is the hallmark of vision, talent, and professionalism! I know you had your work cut out for you and you delivered once again!
Sincerely and with highest esteem, ddavid
Guy@313
“The quote ‘Gnome 2 is dead’ keeps cropping up time and again but what all fail to recognize is none of these new Desktop Environments are anywhere near as stable.”
Stability was never an argument from my perspective. Yet you say “all fail to recognize.” As I have mentioned umpteen million times, I’m still running a Mint 9 machine, and it’s fantastic and stable. As far as my input is concerned, I never said or even implied that Gnome 3 was more stable than Gnome 2. Any DE at it’s beginning stages of a major change isn’t going to be as stable as the previous platform.
But what is true–as stable as it might be–is that Gnome 2 is old technology. The Gnome developers have made clear what their intentions are, and the source code for Gnome 2 will no longer be maintained–whether we like it or not.
I will agree with you that MATE is not a particular project that I would put my resources in, but on the surface, it seems oddly contradictory that you would say that, being such a trumpet for the continuation of Gnome 2. Perhaps I am not completely understanding what MATE is, but it is my understanding that it is a fork of Gnome 2. In other words, the no longer maintained source code for Gnome 2 has been acquired and efforts are made to maintain the source code. In short, Gnome 2 and MATE are derived from the very same source code. They are the same thing essentially. So whether you choose to develop MATE or Gnome 2, isn’t it the same old code?
Please don’t misunderstand. I still really like Gnome 2, and again, that’s my primary DE right now. But when the time comes to change, I understand that Gnome 2 is history. I will have to embrace whatever choice is most practical, and fully supported. And it’s possible that that will be KDE.
On the other hand, I’m betting that Clem and the team will be well on their way to making Cinnamon an obvious candidate for the main edition. Keep in mind that I’m not one to jump ship on the primary PC very quickly. That is to say, I’m not fickle. I do like testing the latest and greatest stuff, but when it comes down to dependability, I stick very closely to the “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” philosophy. Please be reminded Guy, that blanket statements tend to alienate.
m_h_n@308
I understand your concern, and I made a comment that highlights that in an earlier post. Clem knows full well that with this greater responsibility comes greater chances of breakage. But there are major components to the source code that can remain untouched, making sure to preserve compatibility with Gnome 3. At the same time, other lesser important components can be significantly modified yielding the results that we are looking for, while not compromising compatibility. Look at it this way: You go and buy a new car. It’s the same model as your old one, but it’s also different in a lot of ways. It’s better because it’s got a more fuel efficient engine and it looks nicer. You can buy one with all the options, or you can get it with little or no options. But either choice will get you around with the same fuel efficient new engine. The only difference is, depending on the options you get, one might be a bit more comfortable. Gnome 3 out of the box is actually quite the stripped down new car, but it is still a full blown DE, and is quite capable. It’s just not as comfortable for some of us, myself included. But suppose your old car had an option that you really wanted in your new car. To save some money, would you remove the option out of your old car and try to stick it in the new car? That would be silly. Rather, you would have the dealer install the option that’s designed for your new car. In a way–I suppose as a result of the shear madness that is Gnome 3–Clem made an attempt to install Gnome 2 like options into Gnome 3, hence the MGSE project. While it was a valiant attempt, and much appreciated, it is what it is. It’s like trying to install a tape deck from a 1990 Lexus into the 2012 model. That being said, Cinnamon is simply the more logical approach. The 2012 Lexus is far more expensive, but in the end, you will be oodles happier. This is my two cents, but even if it’s total crap, I at least hope it instills some confidence in you. LOL
@PB
“Gnome 2 and MATE are derived from the very same source code. They are the same thing essentially.”
I understand the two should be the same but MATE being derived from the same source code then why is it so unstable ?
We all appreciate the efforts Clem and the team are going to. If Cinnamon ticks all the right boxes MGSE will most likely be short lived. Whether this is a good or bad thing I am not certain as many are happy with Mint 12 and the layout etc. myself warming very slightly when I run Mint 12 from LiveDVD but this does make me an outright fan before you pick me up on this.
My concern is are Clem and the team taking on too much at once trying to make sure they keep the #1 spot on Distrowatch ?
Does it really matter where Mint figures on Distrowatch and is it time to slow things down a little ?
These are valid questions I am sure.
MATE is a clear waste of resources as it will never be pure Gnome 2 despite the appearance of it.
@ PB
Correction
does NOT make me an outright fan before you pick me up on this
I liked Gnome 3 for about a week before the novelty wore off. I’ve switched back to Debian squeeze for now, but I’ll definitely boot up Mint again to give this a try.
Guy@316
I don’t think Clem has ever mentioned that he is superbly concerned about how distrowatch.com ranks Mint. Some might assume that, but I know I don’t care. It’s intriguing for sure, but really not important.
I think things will slow down, but perhaps in other areas. Like I mentioned before, I think we may see a lull in the development of LMDE. This is purely conjecture.
But put your own desires aside temporarily and then put yourself in Clem’s shoes. How would you reallocate your time and resources if you were in charge of the Mint machine knowing that you need to make the largest amount of people happy?
As for the differences between MATE and GNOME 2, it’s unclear as to exactly what stage MATE picks up from the Gnome 2 source code. I can’t explain the instability, but we could possibly be looking at Gnome 2 source code that stems from the earliest beginnings of that project–back when it too was unstable. That’s just a thought, Clem has not been specific about that detail.
The bottom line is decisions need to be made, and Clem is making them. This is not to say that it will be smooth sailing. All we can do is be supportive, and offer any constructive criticism. In the end, taking on the largest responsibility has the greatest potential. I just feel like things could be a whole lot worse. We can all forget about distrowatch for now. Just look at how other distros are responding to Cinnamon. Perhaps this might unlock some other resources for Clem if the other developers offer a little of their own.
@ PB
I do not understand why my comments are taken out of context. Much of the development on Cinnamon is no doubt positive but my primary concern is that Clem and the team are trying to achieve too much at once.
Whilst wasting resources on MATE would time not be better spent on Cinnamon or indeed MGSE.
My comments are not negative I just care what happens to Mint seeing as I have been working with it since release 3.0 Cassandra
I gave Cinnamon a try. It certainly shows promise but so far it feels like Gnome Shell with the MGSE extensions enabled whether I want them or not.
What I want most from a desktop environment is configurability. Gnome 2 (and MATE, in principle) are ace for me because I can have as many panels as I want and put anything I want on each one, wherever I want it.
Indrid Cold@321
It sounds like you answered your own question–if there was one in there somewhere. It does show promise, but it’s not where we want it yet. That’s coming. If there is a down side to forking Gnome 3 like Clem has, it’s that changes might not come as quickly as we’d like. But there should be no surprise there really, as the team has to make sure that they don’t break important components of Gnome 3 while giving us the freedom that we’re looking for. Rest assured, however, that Cinnamon is the approach most likely to give us what we’re looking for in the long term. Better yet, it offers the best opportunity that those changes will work like we expect them to, meaning stability will also be a key benefit.
Once Clem gets his arms around the Gnome 3 source code, then it’s only logical that we will see things change at a more steady pace–notice I said a “steady” pace, not rapid. Again, the trade off will be time. So a little patience will go a long way for our own sanity. Please be assured that I’m not saying that you specifically are being impatient, because I think your concern is adequately echoed throughout this blog. But that’s directed at all of us here with the same concerns and anxieties, myself included.
What´s with the taskbar tab brackets?
IMO the desktop would look nicer and cleaner without them.
Not so “terminalish” 😀
Hy.
I was waiting for the KDE release at LM 11, and LM 12. Enough! At the next time, I will switch to Arch KDE. Like somebody says, you just trying to fix the Gnomeish stuffs and ignoring the KDE users. If anybody not interested in the Gnomish stuffs, then they are stuck. Okay, I’m fed up with this. Bye, Mint, but good luck to you all!
Seeing the excitement here, I downloaded and played with it for half hour. Unless I missed something fundamental, Cinnamon is Gnome 3.2 + windows/KDE style task bar/system tray? I still didn’t get back my old Gnome applets (Gnome 3.2 shell extensions have been abandoned anyway). As far as look and polish go, I failed to see what Cinnamon does that Gnome 3.2 wasn’t already. You still can execute your fav apps from desktop in Gnome 3.2. How does Cinnamon solve the main problems of old Gnome applets on tray and productive UI?
As I said, I may have missed something obvious and would like to be enlightened. I am still petrified by the fall from Lucid Lynx/Mint 11 + Gnome glory to utter confusion today. Such is the state of desperation that any new hope is looked at as life saving drug.
I like the optimism but I am still looking to find out what Cinnamon gives us back that Gnome 3.x snatched away? Wasn’t that the main issue?
I am asking in a very constructive and open minded way. I honestly appreciate the courageous attempts being made by Clem and team to salvage the situation.
“One unique bottom panel which you can auto-hide (and which location will be configurable in the future)”
Please make sure that you can put this panel vertically on the side and have the Window list not rotate (or the option to rotate) so that the text of the windows lists stays horizontal! Thank you i’m anxious to try this out!
@ Verona007
I understand your frustration but threatening to switch distros. is negative to the extreme. What did I say about Linux users being fickle in post #313. I rest my case. Use whatever distro. you want but there is no need to through your toys out of the pram !
@Verona007
Lisa KDE edition has just been approved as an RC release.
http://community.linuxmint.com/iso
A little bit more patience is very important in these “troubled waters” Linux world is experiencing in this days. (IMO)
Have fun everybody!
Verona007@324
Say it with me–Goosfraba!!!!
Clem is not ignoring you. I’m sure you realize this, but Gnome occupies the current Mint Main Edition slot. This does not mean he is discounting your preference toward KDE, it’s just a matter of circumstance. We will see KDE RC out there soon enough. Remember, he doesn’t have hundreds of people all cooped up in their little work stations pecking away at code. In fact, it’s always a pretty big event when Clem announces that he has hired another full time developer for the next year or whatever. Have you seen the most recent post on the home page? Like Guy said, feel free to do whatever you like, but my gut says that you will kick yourself if you jump ship right now. KDE is coming! But patience will save us some agony.
Guy@320
I’m confused. I don’t know which one of your comments I took out of context. Could you please clarify, and perhaps I can reword things in such a way that you don’t feel that they were taken out of context.
@Verona007
And there you have it!!!! Thanks avasili!!!!!
For those awaiting KDE edition,this will be good news. http://community.linuxmint.com/iso
I have been using Linux since RedHat 7.1 (2001). My main distros were Debian, Gentoo, Archlinux and, now, Linux Mint. For me, LMDE is one of the most brilliant ideas in Linux Distro’s world. I have a clean, stable, customized, and upgradable operational system (debian-based) with some facilities that really improve my production (linux mint’s tools). I really hope that the project keep moving and, when I got some free time, I’ll contribute just like I have contributed with Gentoo and Archlinux once. Thanks Clem and the others for Linux Mint DE.
This may sound out of context. Nevertheless I want to write this down.
I really do not understand this frustration of always having the latest and the greatest. I want the new version, I want the new version. Why is that? (if I may ask). If you do not have the next version, you are doomed. It looks like computer is not working anymore. My softwares of everyday use stopped working. People can’t be anymore productive. Previous versions are not trial ware, that after a year stops working.
If I was very happy and thrilled to put my hands on the new version, and I was congratulating everyone for the great work they had done on the release, now after a year or a bit more, is everything really trash? I do not think so. Because time passes thinks do not really loose their functionality, probably it’s me getting bored and I need something new to pass my time.
And we than make the mistake of asking and asking for free and wonderful and always up to date operating systems. Putting pressure to others, and forget how much work, thinking, talking, testing, decisions to make, (not forgetting that developers have a life too, family), dealing with users comments, trying to understand and fulfill requests and wishes. Only thinking of this, makes me happy I’m not a developer but only a user, a user trying to have the patience to wait and help out where I can. And in the mean time, enjoying what proved to be wonderful some time ago. 🙂
Congratulation to the team for the working, nice and good looking, cinnamon, that gives us again what we, a few months ago, called “home”.
Cheers,
abvasili
A correction:
Because time passes things do not really loose their functionality, probably it’s me getting bored and I need something new to pass my time.
avasili@332
Amen!! I can’t tell you how many times I’ve made similar expressions. I still use a Linux Mint 9 PC, and you know what? It works great! I can’t tell you how many times I’ve said that too. From a practical point of view, why would anyone really really need to upgrade to even the latest kernel unless they knew that it would address a hardware issue they were having? Your Operating System has no idea what time it is, or that there is an RC getting ready to come out. It doesn’t all of a sudden take a crap just because there is something new out there. And if 20 years goes by, and I load my current PC with a Linux Mint 7 ISO, guess what? That will work too. I won’t receive software updates, but you get the idea.
If someone feels like you took their post out of context, then there is no reasoning with them. As for me, your comment is well taken, and I am completely on board with your position. I do like new things and I enjoy testing them, but my life isn’t over if something is slightly or even greatly amiss with the latest tech. Aside from offering a tip that might answer a specific question from time to time, the primary reason why I post is to help people in the blog have a realistic view of what’s really going on. And I only hope that some do and begin to back off a little as a result.
@PB
Thanks, I’m happy that we share the same point of view. I’m sure many many others think the same.
Let’s go than shoulder to shoulder helping the best distro out there, AKA Linux MINT!!! 🙂
It certainly improves the Gnome 3 experience a bit and therefore nice work, but i don’t get tired of saying Gnome 3 is a major setback over Gnome 2.32.x, in terms of usability and configurability.
MATE is working perfectly, so, for me, there’s no need for Cinnamon.
As a VERY new user to Linux and Linux MINT, this is nice. It gives me a nice transition from Windows XP. Thanks for all that is provided here. I am really enjoying this OS.
I haven’t ventured into MATE, so I can’t say to much about it, other than I’m glad it’s working for you.
However, I’m not sure what I’m about to say is good news or bad news for you. I suppose it’s all related to your perspective. But the Cinnamon project will improve greatly as time goes on. Will it ever be exactly like Gnome 2? That’s doubtful, but I really think that Clem will be able to incorporate the things we miss the most about Gnome 2–configurability being perhaps the largest of those things–while not treading on the great new technology that Gnome 3 brings to the table.
On the other hand, what is also doubtful is how much longer the MATE project will continue. It is at least a source of heated debate. I can’t speak for Clem or the team, but I think it’s at least keeping in the back of your mind. On the surface, Cinnamon seems to have the greatest potential, so don’t completely shut the door just yet. Perhaps just visiting the blogs once in awhile might give you all you need to know. I’m with you in that I haven’t committed yet either. I still run LM9 and am loving it.
BTW, Post 337 was for Hoffmann@336
Sorry about that.
Tried it and still do not like all things Gnome3. My kids absolutely love it though!
I think it would be interesting to get a breakdown of like/dislike Gnome3 (the three shells are all the same as far as I can tell) and Gnome2/Mate versus age. My prediction is that old-timers like myself prefer things the old way, and the younger generation prefer the new stuff.
I would go so far as to say that if you know what ‘./configure && make install’ does, you probably prefer Gnome2 stuff. If all you know is ‘apt-get install’ you probably prefer Gnome3. 😀
Firstly, from a community perspective, I’d like to say congratulations and thanks. I’m all for choice, and Linux Mint seems to have taken the most care in providing the end user with a variety of readily accessible desktop choices. To me, that’s an important element in what it means to be “user friendly”, and I’m very appreciative of the path you’re taking.
Secondly, from a personal perspective, I’d like to explain why I’m not choosing Cinnamon at present. I work with my windows maximized, and seldom see the desktop except when I first boot the computer. Hence, it’s immaterial to me what colour the desktop is, or what computer art it has on it. The important thing for me is to have the titles of my open windows permanently visible on a readily accessible but unobtrusive panel. Mate gives me that – but from the look of the second screenshot at the head of this article, Cinnamon may not. I certainly don’t want to have to return to the desktop to click on a reduced picture whenever I want to change windows (but I haven’t yet tried Cinnamon, so I may be missing how it works in practice). I’m willing to investigate further – but Mate suits the way I work, and I haven’t had any problems with it so far, on 64 bit Mint 12
faraway@340
I’m not sure what screenshots you might be referring to, but I have Cinnamon loaded on a work PC and the bottom panel has a switcher built in that works quite nicely–not unlike it did in Gnome 2. I still can’t change too much about that panel, but the good thing is it’s small, has the Mint Menu, and again, the application switcher works nicely. You can add quick launchers to it as well by simply finding the application in the Mint Menu, doing a right click, and scrolling down to the add to panel option. That works well also. Hope that helps.
Thanks, PB – I’ll give it a try!
Definitely keeping my eye on this. Looking very good! Just needs a several more things to make it complete for me: Compiz support, panel applet and indicator applet support, multiple panels, ability to place panel someplace other than the bottom, and support for other menus such as standard Gnome 2 menu and the “old” Mint menu. Until then, I’m sticking to Linux Mint 10 (at least until support drops off – not sure what I’ll do then, as Mint 11 doesn’t work as well on my hardware).
I hope that most of the panel applets from Gnome2 (such as weather, cpu speed, logout, shutdown, etc) will be ported to Cinnamon. I like the way my Mint 9 desktop works, and I hope that by the time the LTS support is over the replacement Mint LTS will have a mature and very functional version of Cinnamon. I played around with LMDE Xfce and had some printer problems (it’s on my laptop but as soon as Cinnamon is available for LMDE I think I will migrate it over). BTW you need to come up with a new LMDE iso, thanks to the update 3 pack the current iso is VERY broken and takes some head scratching (and a LONG download update) to fix.
Gnome3 was certainly heading in the wrong direction for the desktop, though it might make sense for tablets and mobile devices. What the Gnome guys SHOULD have done was to start a new GUI for those devices while keeping the current desktop. There is no reason they couldn’t have supported both worlds.
I was wondering what I was going to do after 11 expires. I found so many problems with 12 that I went back to 11. I am looking forward to the future of Linux Mint.
Many Thanks to the Linux Mint Team.
I used Mint 12 for exactly 1 day and soon switched back to Mint 9. Cinnamon looks good so far and I hope that by the time Mint 13 comes out all the bugs that made gnome 3 unusable are finally worked out.
Clem,
I have one small request regarding cinnamon. Is there any way to move the menu button over to the extreme bottom left of the screen so when you bang your cursor down to the bottom and left and click you will get the menu, instead of having to move it over a little bit to the right to make the menu appear after a click?
This would make it PERFECT!
Thanks so much,
Colin
Well… I got it installed in a ‘vanilla’ Mint 12 on my Tosh NB200…. and from the intial play I had, I like it.
I’d still like to know why it’s having such a mare on VM’s…. – can’t see any good reason for it. Every other OS and desktop I’ve thrown at Fusion has worked just fine – except for the original Gnome 3 code that didn’t like my setup.
When I get the time to play some more, it’ll probably grow on me.
Cinnamon works. I have not been as excited about my Linux DE in a long while. I am pleased that someone with skills that far exceed mine, has taken it upon themselves to bring GTK3 within my grasp – I really disliked Gnome 3 and fell back to XFCE/LXDE – Both awesome (but simple). With cinnamon, I see hope for change. Thanks brother Clem and the mystery mint team; job well done!
Is it possible to try Cinnamon on Linux Mint 11 installation?
hi there, thanks for all your work!
i am still using linux mint 11 as linux mint 12 has some bugs. the localisation is not complete and i have a mix of german and english. to my opinion cinnamon is driving the gnome 3-concept ad absurdum. in linux mint 12 i am using gnome 3 as it is so i would like to know, if there will be a possibility to simply uninstall cinnamon and mate in linux mint 13.
nice regards from germany,
dronthor
Love it! A huge thanks to Clem and the Mint Team. You made my transition from horrid windows to linux so easy and really appreciate all the work you do, especially for noobs like me.
I am personally very satisfied with GNOME3 which I use without any MGSE, HOWEVER:
I am delighted that these extensions are available to those who feel otherwise
I am delighted that MATE is available for those who feel otherwise
I am delighted that Cinnamon is available for those who feel otherwise
That is, indeed, Clem’s immense merit that he listens to the community and offers *CHOICES*. These two seemingly obvious things (listening and offering choices) is exactly what Canonical has failed to do and why it is going down the tubes. That is the real spirit of our community of free software users: not a top->down world a la Steve Jobs or Mark Shuttleworth, but a down->up world in which project leaders actually care about what people want (rather then telling them what they “should want”).
Clem – thanks a lot for all the work you and the other developers do, this is fantastic!
Farhad
Farhad@352
Well said!! That is exactly the attitude that we need to have about a project like Linux Mint. I say this because through this whole Gnome 3 ordeal, the Mint blog has contained more than enough complaints about how Clem is forcing this down our throats, or Clem is forcing that, and that he’s taking away our choices. Fortunately, most posters don’t feel this way. But if you ask me, one complaint like this is simply too many. It’s also unfair and completely false.
On the other hand, it’s not often that we hear from users that are completely happy with Gnome 3 in it’s purest form. No matter. If you’re happy, then mission accomplished. Enjoy it!
However, I will say this: I think we need to more clearly understand the difference between Mint’s approach and that of Canonical. As far as DEs are concerned, Canonical really hasn’t taken anything away. Unity has simply taken the place of Gnome. So in effect, they broke even. I think what’s frustrating for Ubuntu users is that it doesn’t appear that Canonical has done much to integrate some of the Gnome 2 functionality, or at least launch an MGSE like project to mimic various Gnome 2 behaviors that we’ve come to love. But in their defense, neither have many other distros.
The bottom line is that Canonical hasn’t really done much of anything that they wouldn’t normally do with a new release–either reactively or proactively. But truth be told, this is the way it’s been for quite some time–right or wrong. Where Mint has surged forward is in the fact that they reacted quickly in emergency situations(MGSE & MATE). Better yet, they responded proactively by acquiring the Gnome 3 source code so they could make it do what they want, rather, what we want. Hence, the Cinnamon project.
I guess what I’m trying to say is Mint is distancing themselves from the others, not the other way around. Canonical just seems to be acting like nothing ever happened–they don’t appear to be going forward or backward. Is this good or bad, and is it the beginning of the end? Does Canonical know something we don’t know? Are they selling out? There is no hidden message in these questions–they’re just questions. But Mark Shuttleworth is a whole lot smarter than me, and time will tell what’s up his sleeve, if anything.
But in the end, I too appreciate very much what Mint has done for my desktop experience, and even if the whole thing falls flat on its face, no one can blame Clem for not doing his very best.
A Right Step at right time. A novice like I actually did not disliked Gnome3 but MATE was not a good idea.I just could not handle it. My thinking is when we take a step forward, we should not, time & again look back. Gnome3 is good and much rich and is here to stay.Many Thanks to Mint for thinking of users like us and taking decisions accordingly. Every step forward is a Warm Welcome.
Screen shots on Cinnamon make me feel of a better Mint.Can the screen be made a bit less dark? I mean a light Green:)
@PB
I agree with your views regarding the spirit of Linux Mint. Linux Mint has done far better than others to handle Gnome “crisis”.
However, could you please answer my simple questions in comment no #325 above? I just want to understand the whole euphoria.
@PB: “I guess what I’m trying to say is Mint is distancing themselves from the others, not the other way around”
Well, with all due respect, I don’t think I can agree here. And the issue is not Unity in itself (which I intensely dislike, but which others like a lot), but the MANNER in which it was introduced. I distinctly remember Shuttleworth saying in effect “our desktop specialists are best qualified to decide what kind of desktop Ubuntu needs” thereby implying either that 1) what Ubuntu needs is not what the community needs or 2) that Canonical desktop specialists know better than the community what it needs. This is exactly the approach Shuttleworth has had with Wayland too, by the way. This is also how Unity developers responded when faced with criticisms or bug reports about Unity. This is also how Unity decided to flood its software center with for-pay non-free applications. There is overwhelming evidence that Ubuntu, which used to be very much community-oriented, has now been suddenly and brutally re-oriented towards a corporation-oriented, top->down model a la Mac/Apple. Furthermore, I think that it was Fab on “Linux Outlaws” which noticed how the word “linux” has all but vanished from Ubuntu’s branding. Lastly, Canonical clearly has decided that it wants to create one OS for any and all devices out there, from smartphones, to tablets, to TV, to computers. Nobody in the community was consulted about these massive changes (at least that I am aware of): Shuttleworth shows up at UDS and simply hands down the Truth like Moses handed down the Tablets of the Law to the Israeli people. Except that Shuttleworth is no Moses 🙂
Is Shuttleworth smart? Probably yes. But his leadership style and recent decisions took the flagship of all linux distros and ran them into the ground. There is no denying that the past 12 months have been a *disaster* for Ubuntu and that the level of frustration in the community is unprecedented (at least since I can remember, since 2000). If Shuttleworth had been a Debian Project Leader he would have been voted out of office a long time ago with that kind of record.
In contrast, Clem has managed to muster up phenomenal support and praise not only because the MGSE or Cinnamon are so good (they are) or because Mint 12 rocks (it does), but primarily because of his leadership style.
I am personally an Ubuntu-refugee who came to Mint only because I ‘voted with my feet’ and dumped Ubuntu in total disgust, but I am not alone. There is no denying that Ubuntu lost A LOT of people and that many, if not most, of them came to Mint. So far, checking with my friends and contacts, everybody is quite happy not only with Mint and Clem, but also with the very welcoming Mint community.
Not only did Mint not distance itself from the community, it is now becoming our community’s flagship, replacing Ubuntu in this role. As for Ubuntu, time will show whether it can accomplish its dream of becoming the next Apple. I personally don’t care either way.
Partho Banerjee@355
We have to remember that we are at the beginning stages of the Cinnamon project. In a sense, Clem is having to reinvent the wheel. Remember, Clem has the Gnome 3 source code at his disposal, and he has forked it into the Cinnamon project. Clem knows what he wants to do with it, but he also needs to be familiar enough with it so as not to break important components. I imagine he also wants to maintain compatibility with Gnome moving forward. But he also wants to make us happy, which is assuredly the most daunting aspect of this entire venture.
Think of it this way: There is a road–we’ll call it Gnome 3. Gnome 3 is a bumpy road, right? But it will get you there, and actually has some great things about it. But we’re distracted by all the bumpiness. What do we do? We build another road off of that one–we’ll call it the Cinnamon fork. We want to stay as close to the original road as possible, even keeping it in clear sight. But we don’t want the bumps. The only way Clem can do this is by having the source code for the original road close at hand to maintain the overall direction. But with the new construction, he can eliminate the bumps and add things that make the road more enjoyable to use, all the while reaching the same destination.
As I said before, Clem is at the very beginning stages of building that fork into a much smoother experience. I know this is a lot to read, but the short answer is: It’s simply going to take some time for us to see more obvious results, but they are coming.
The excitement for me comes from what lies ahead, not from what Cinnamon is right now. If it were the here and now, then I would be in the same boat as you, with not much to be excited about. A word to the wise: If you are not patient with the development of this project, you will be disappointed. But if you are patient, I feel confident that your patience will be greatly rewarded.
Farhad@356
Obviously you are far more informed about the fallacies of Canonical and Mark Shuttleworth. But to restate my point more specifically, what Mint is doing is actually exponential in proportion to the distancing of themselves. For the sake of argument, I will concede defeat and say that, yes, you are correct–Canonical is somewhat responsible for going in the perceived opposite direction. But again, Mint’s contribution to their own current status is exponential comparatively speaking–especially in view of the limited resources that Clem has at his disposal.
What many of us forget is that there are several schools of thought about doing anything at all. In this case, we could boil it down to being successful. Don’t believe for a second that Mark Shuttleworth from the very beginning didn’t care about being successful. Otherwise, he wouldn’t be where he is today. Successes like Ubuntu don’t happen by accident. Perhaps Shuttleworth has gone the way of the Mac in a sense. But you know what? Mac works, and statistically speaking, it is the easiest environment to use especially for the older generation who may be just coming around to computers. The bottom line, is it’s his decision to do what ever he feels will make him most successful, whether we like it or not. If we don’t like it, we do like you and I do and move on to something better suited for us.
That being said, don’t think for a second that Clem doesn’t want to become successful either. The growing success that Mint is becoming doesn’t happen by accident either. But like you said–who really cares?
@PB: “Perhaps Shuttleworth has gone the way of the Mac in a sense. But you know what? Mac works”
Absolutely. I completely agree. But Mac works *outside* the GNU/Linux community. This is why I ended my previous post with the comment that “As for Ubuntu, time will show whether it can accomplish its dream of becoming the next Apple. I personally don’t care either way”. Not because I dislike Mac (I do) but because once you are outside our community you are also off my “radar screen”. But yes, of course, there is a demand for Mac products and there might be one for Canonical products. In fact, considering all the good Canonical and Shuttleworth have done to our community in the past (and that is something we should not forget), I wish them well and I hope that Canonical will become profitable (which is really the single biggest factor behind all these changes). But that does not change the fact that Shuttleworth and Canonical have departed from us – the community – for new, possibly more profitable, horizons. That is their full right, of course. But is is our right to make our on conclusions when we observe this, and tell them “thanks a lot for everything, all the best, and good-bye!”.
The beauty of free software (thanks RMS!!) is that even if a major figure like Shuttleworth or an influential company like Canonical decide to leave us, they cannot take the code away with them or, rather, they can, but they cannot take it away from us. At the end of the day, we – the community – own the code and there is nothing corporate honchos can do about it :-p
Cheers!
Okay, so all the euphoria is in “anticipation” of something good/nice coming along the way, if I understood you (@PB) correctly.
Needless to say that I am highly appreciative of the efforts being made to salvage the situation.
You now what, Gnome is my first love. But look at Gnome 3.x. It only wears the dress of Gnome. It’s skin, body and spirit are gone. All you have is the label and logo of Gnome. About it’s being intuitive and productivity, enough has been said already.
My question is: Why using KDE is considered something like hobnobing with Nazis during 1930’s and 40’s? Why is it so much “outlawed” that we can make two, three, counting Gnome forks but not even try out KDE with an open mind? Clem sure is running around to do the best but why so much expectation? Please give Clem few months time.
After all, KDE is part of Linux family. I recently started using KDE and I find what the Gnome forks are trying to achieve, it’s already present in a polished fashion in KDE. This is not about Gnome V/s KDE. Both have their strengths. But presently, KDE is the obvious “choice”. That’s because Gnome (and forks) don’t look and feel the Gnome that we know and like.
I can’t understand why is it portrayed as a “disgrace” to even try KDE until Gnome is again back on it’s strong feet. I do miss Gnome 2.x badly, make no mistake. I got introduced to wonderful Linux world using that.
I see no reason why the desperation level won’t go down if Gnome-broken hearts are encouraged to try KDE with an open mind and give it some time to be liked/disliked.
Partho Banerjee@360
I feel your pain. There is nothing at all wrong with KDE from my perspective. I have it running on a PC at work and it’s very nice, and if I had to complain, it would be that there are a few too many options available. But that’s insignificant for me personally.
A couple of things to keep in mind: KDE went through a transition with the advent of version 4, and it was messy. Lot’s of KDE zealots left it because of instability, to mention just one major flaw during that time. But KDE has settled in quite well since those days. Perhaps some are just not willing to look back. That’s their choice. But you and I both see that it is perfectly usable. Is it different? A little. But like you said, it’s actually already implementing many of the things that we miss about Gnome 2 for the most part. Go figure. I don’t understand the aversion either.
Gnome is also going through a messy transition. While it does suffer from some stability issues, most people complain about features that seem to have simply been dropped. I am one of those people.
But Clem is in a position altogether different. It’s not just a matter of personal preference for him. He has an entire community to think about and try to make happy. While he may prefer Gnome, that’s not the driving force behind wanting to make it work. We are the driving force. Yes, there are those in the Mint community who like KDE just fine, and Clem has graciously maintained the KDE edition. But it is the minority. In other words, though it’s doubtful, Clem might secretly prefer KDE. But since the large majority of users have grown to love Gnome, he is going to bust his butt to make it work. At the same time, he is going to remember his KDE users to the extent possible. What more can we ask from a developer?
When we make a personal choice of DE like KDE or Gnome, then we have to accept what goes along with it. If we choose KDE, then we wait a little bit for the latest and greatest. If we choose Gnome 3, then we suffer, and wait, suffer and wait, suffer, and wait–until Clem is able to really make things happen.
To simply switch the main edition to one based on KDE is wildly more complicated than it seems. This is not something you just do overnight, especially since Clem’s staff is mostly Gnome specific. Who knows though, maybe the relationship with Netrunner will put KDE and Gnome on a more even keel developmentally speaking. This is the hope I believe.
If I had to summarize what Clem is doing in just a few short phrases, I would say he is not only trying to fix Gnome right now, but doing his best to have more control in the future, so when major changes take place, it won’t be nearly as difficult to manage–although he has done a stellar job holding things together right now. And the partnership with Blue Systems will perhaps accelerate his ability to offer KDE as a viable option more quickly in the event of another Gnome debacle. Just a thought.
I’ve tried alot of distros I have been loyal to mint since mint 7 came out. I use mint 9 LTS the most and I have slightly used 12 so far. I prefer mint 9 because the apps and packages work better with mint9. I am now trying cinnamon looks ok almost like the new gnome. hope something good comes out of all this change. What is the next long term support version going to be?
@Clem You can say, as Joe Namath once said, “We did it! We did it!” because, indeed, You’ve done it! You’ve done it! —Cinnamon is amazing!
Ubuntu —Canonical— has all the right to pursue its interests, and with the present CES it has become obvious what everyone was thinking about —they want to be an OS for tablets and TV. However, some of us need to do something more than surfing the Web, reading email, and watching Youtube videos…
I had been using Ubuntu 11.10 —Gnome Shell I just couldn’t understand; LXDE (Lubuntu desktop) was nice but somewhat unstable; so I had to accommodate my self to Unity. But as soon as I finished an urgent job, I installed Linux Mint Lisa.
Mate, just as LXDE, is a fine desktop environment, and I’m sure both will be soon great alternatives to what Gnome 2 was. MGSE is —are— great —a nice working environment on top of an unintelligible to me Gnome 3.
Anyway, I decided to try Cinnamon, and… This is it! This is it! A nice, clean, unobtrusive desktop environment with a lot of real state for all my open windows, and quite elegant, if I may say. Of course, I —dare say, we— hope to see in a near future customizable options for it, but for me this is what a working environment for desktop computers and laptops should be.
My warmest thanks to Clem and the Linux Mint team!
Axel
Absolutely. KDE had it’s “emergency” after 4.0 release and as you correctly pointed out, many KDE “zealots” went to Gnome for their own good. Today KDE has many Gnome refugees and very few among them are complaining. It’s all in the family. That’s precisely my point. Open mind.
Btw, I never implied that making KDE as the default desktop was any solution to handle Gnome crisis. That may be an ongoing independent consideration but not a good idea as a knee jerk response. Parallel KDE releases are just fine.
Clem is doing what people expect. I just hoped more people gave KDE a try now. it’s very stable and pleasing and certainly deserves a closer look. This would ease the crisis without really losing anything. That would allow more time to Clem to get creative about Cinnamon.
Trying KDE is not like cheating on spouse. Cinnamon shows great promise but it needs time to mature.
Wow. I looks cool. Performs better than Mate. I love it.
Partho Banerjee#367
I suppose the main reason why I included the comment about KDE becoming the main desktop is there are several posters who feel that it should become that because of their success with KDE. After reading your comment a little closer, I see that wasn’t really your intent specifically. So I apologize for the implication.
But I hope others that do feel that KDE needs to leap into the Main Edition slot will understand that there is so much more involved in the decisions that any developer makes as far as their offerings, what they have as the primary DE, etc. It’s not that KDE isn’t a good DE and can’t replace Gnome. It’s simply more complicated than that. I know you understand that, but so many don’t.
That being said, people commend Clem for his hard work on a continual basis, and make expressions of gratitude constantly. But when something happens that they don’t like, or things aren’t moving quickly enough, not all, but a considerable number of these same people completely forget all about what’s been done and get real ugly, real fast. Guy made a comment about the “fickle” Linux community. While I haven’t done extensive research on his commentary to determine that that is in fact the predominant behavior, I would certainly count the above observation as evidence of that. This is not directed at you, because you obviously are open minded enough to try different things like KDE.
Again, my personal excitement comes in the form of looking ahead. Clem is in an incredibly pivotal position right now. And I just can’t wait to see how this all plays out. At the same time, I have confidence that it will work out well for him and the direction of Mint. It’s just a question of how well.
What are the icons in systray on Screenshot #3?
It’s:
1. -> Coffee cup? A lock? A keyboard? A G? A cloud? <-
6. Dropbox.
Once again, Mint team, you continue to impress me as you wade through a confusing time in the Linux world.
I had just gotten used to MGSE when Cinnamon 1.1.3 came out. I decided to give it a whirl.
I do like it. I think, while MGSE made the absolute best of a bad situation and it was usable and I did like it, it was a step backwards for new users who may be slower to adapt to change than someone like me (who straddles the fence between “average user” and “geek”).
This is a vast improvement in that regard. It’s far more familiar, and the “identity crisis” that I saw in MGSE is mostly gone. Mint feels like it knows what it is again. The redundant features and conflicting themes are gone.
That said, there’s still some problems in my eyes.
I still don’t feel like there’s enough customization. I know you guys are working on this – and I’m patient. But I still can’t right click on the panel. I still can’t swap the menu. The configuration options seem limited. And those where are seem more hidden.
Also, none of the themes feel “polished” except for the default Cinnamon theme. I really like the black of Mint-Z-Dark, but the menu and panel are squished and hard to use. So are all the other themes, except for Cinnamon. So, even though I’m not a huge fan of the gray, I use that because it’s the only one that isn’t terrible to look at. Again, I’m sure you guys are working on that.
That’s my .02. But I think Cinnamon will make a great flagship, and I’m so glad you guys are working on this rather than continuing to struggle with Gnome 3. It’s already an improvement and I’m excited for the future!
very cool! this is the right way !! keep it up!
(molto molto bella, questa è la strada giusta da seguire)
I now have Cinnamon on my monitor and in my coffee and it’s making my whole world taste better. Looking forward to the future of cinnamon.
Keep up the great work!
So far, so good. Lots of “little things” missing, but it’s pleasant, it’s solid, it has a clear identity, and I like where it’s going. So, I’ll break my “never use bleeding edge” rule and keep an eye on updates.
The reason I switched to Gnome 2 (after KDE and XFCE) is because I felt that it had just the right amount of customization to make you productive (if a desktop “encourages” too much customization without “clear guidance” users like me get a less productive platform in the end because the forest of tweaks is full of unhelpful ones from a productivity viewpoint).
So, I’ll hope that Clem and the gang will keep in mind what made the Gnome 2 user experience one which helped (some) users quickly tweak things in such a way that they got things done.
Another Ubuntu refugee here. I had no clue about the whole Unity/Gnome 3 disaster (or even Linux Mint for that mater) until I ordered a new ZAReason desktop with 11.10 for my grandmother. What an unpleasant surprise!
I’ve been playing with Mint 11 and Mint 12 with Cinnamon for a day and so far and it seems to match what I’m looking for in a Linux desktop: FAMILIAR FEELING, easy to use for the family members I convert, and lots of customizable options. Unity is a classic example of making something harder to use by trying to make it simpler, and gnome 3 is just not ready for prime time.
Cinnamon gives me hope for a continuation of a Gnome2-like DE. My suggestions after using it briefly:
****scrolling in the menu area can be a hassle. I’m not sold on the current fixed-size design that requires scrolling for menus with long lists of apps. I like being able to see all of the apps at once when I click on a specific menu.
***Icons without labels can be confusing for noobs, it would be nice to have an option of turning labels on (example:the favorites section)
****the right-click menus that are missing when trying to modify parts of the gnome 3 desktop was extremely frustrating (example: trying to move some or all of the bar at the top of the screen). make sure Cinnamon doesn’t have this fault.
I really like Cinnamon. But I have a problem – when I uninstalled pulseaudio my sound controll applet desappeared from panel. How can I get it back?
Thanks.
Cinnamon doesn’t work in Virtualbox.Do you know what can I do to make it work.I want to make some tutorials about it.
Thanks, waiting for an answer.
Cinnamon looks nice so far, but I’m leaning over MATE right now, not because Cinnamon is bad or something like that, just because MATE is just working so damn well on my laptop. I hope you guys continue supporting MATE at least until Cinnamon grows somewhat.
And MGSC is awf- I mean, I dun like it. 🙁
I installed Cinnamon a week ago. It works great, been using it since. no serious issues. Again great quality work Clem!
I also tried Razor-qt which is nowhere as nice looking as cinnamon or KDE. That said, boy, is it fast. I recommend giving it a try.
See the link on distrowatch.
http://distrowatch.com/weekly.php?issue=20120109#qa
For those who have used the new Cinnamon Settings and can install themes, I have modified one for you (but left in all of the original credits). First I tried Dark-Glass but wasn’t happy with the way it scrunches up the menu items. I found a theme on deviant art made by satya 164 and under the GPL license called SHINE I asked him if he would modify it, but got no response so I modified it myself to work with Cinnamon. It is a glass theme and looks very nice indeed. Here is the link:
https://backup.filesanywhere.com/FS/v.aspx?v=8c696287615e74baa867
Cinnamon Rocks!
This may not be the right place for this, but it is related, so …
Mint XFCE has no new releases, having been ended in favour of an XFCE version of LMDE. That XFCE version of LMDE was made less light than it could have been. My impression was that was at least partly because Clem was positioning it as a potential distro for users unhappy with Gnome 3.
It now seems fairly clear that there will be clear favourite alternative for users unhappy with Gnome 3-and that is going to be Cinnamon, not LMDE XFCE.
Perhaps in the future, if LMDE is continued to be supported, it could be changed to user fewer Gnome libraries/programs and become once again a more lightweight alternative.
Please note-this is NOT intended as a complaint, just a suggestion from someone who still uses Mint 9 with the default Gnome 2 desktop on all my desktops at work, but who is heading towards XFCE and LXDE at home as alternatives to Gnome 3, which uses more resources than is optimum for my older hardware.
That should have read “if LMDE XFCE is continued to be supported …”
I forgot to mention: Just place the shine theme in your ./theme directory.
Actually, you can place Shine theme in /usr/share/themes Directory OR .theme directory.
Sorry, my typing is lousy today. Place the theme in:
Home/.themes
Mint12 Live cd (32bit) started on a Dell latitude D620 shows a blank desktop with the icons, NOTHING ELSE! Bottom-Menu appeared when clicking mouse on bottomleft corner. After couple more clicks and standard button combination -tests the desktop ‘went bananas’ and stopped working.
I switched away from (k)ubuntu because their live cd is badly organized, hence even starting it up takes abt. 6 minutes! Running it starts the cd whining and winding up&down after every more complicated task. That is not a computer fault…
Because of you screwing up it seems I have to start looking for a USABLE distro again…
Bill great job, but it seems like it still has some issues with the menu :S
Cinnamon is looking good. If I could add widgets to the panel like Gnome2… I’d be happy. CPU Freq, System Mon, and Battery Mon.
I just did a query and am delighted to see this is now in the Sabayon repository too. Can’t wait to try it out on the work lappy.
Nothing, i can only say, IT’S IMPRESSIVE!
I Uploaded a 2nd theme this morning called Dark Shine. It’s a darker version and I like it better. So both are available for Cinnamon at the link above. Have fun!
How do I make Cinnamon as default DE?
Hey clem nice work with Cinnamon. This seems like a major step in the right direction. Ever since the implement of Gnome3 I was cautious with updating to Lisa. With Cinnamon I can at least do most of the things I could in Gnome2. I just have a few bugs or suggestions that you might want to look into. ( I figure you already know them, but I’ll list what I’ve found.)
When clicking on the wifi bar to find different routers the only shown up is the one I connected to. Also when I click more nothing happens, the arrow moves but no more routers show up. I know I have like 13 more other people with routers near me.
Also the audio pop-up for when I click the – or + or mute on my laptop looks like the really old theme for the volume. Not sure what can be done about this.
And can you create a way so that pidgin, xchat, and thunderbird are built into a mail like notification??
Other then these things I really got to say Cinnamon is a winner over all others hands down. Thank you for all the work you and your team is doing to make the Linux Mint Experience better for everyone.
😀
Keep going with cinnamon. You guys are the saviors of Linux. After the Ubuntu and Gnome fiascoes cinnamon is the light at the end of the tunnel. It is the first try and it is already better then any other desktop fantastic work guys.
Absolutely Superb news…
Please also update similarly for LMDE soon…
All the best in your efforts for a cleaner, simpler and nicer Desktop…
@ Martin: I’m not sure what you are referring to. Here is a screenshot of the theme on my desktop:
https://backup.filesanywhere.com/FS/M.aspx?v=917268869d9db579aea8
As you can see the menu is just fine.
I place mine in /home/.themes
Since the the very first day of cinnamon being issued, I’m giving it a try, and I have no complains. Nothing. It’s clear, simple, customizable, beautiful, whatever. Thanks for thinking first on usability. Linux for human beings must have a human “spicy” flavor too.
@ Martin – take the themes out of /usr/share/themes and move them to /home/.themes folder. This should fix the problem and they should look nice.
@ Martin – I found the trouble. If you download themes and place in /home/.themes then YOU should have ownership. And they look nice. But if you place in /usr/share/themes, then ROOT has ownership and they don’t look good unless you change ownership. I tested it and it works.
How can i run PC games in my Linux Mint 20?