The development of Cinnamon began by the Linux Mint team as the result of the April 2011 release of GNOME 3, in which the conventional desktop metaphor of GNOME 2 was discarded in favor of GNOME Shell. Following several attempts to extend GNOME 3 so that it would suit the Linux Mint design goals through "Mint GNOME Shell Extensions", the Linux Mint team eventually forked several GNOME 3 components to build an independent desktop environment. This separation from GNOME was finished with the release of Cinnamon 2.0.0 on October 9, 2013. Applets, extensions, actions, and desklets made explicitly for Cinnamon are no longer compatible with GNOME Shell.
As the distinctive factor and preeminent desktop environment for Linux Mint, Cinnamon has generally received favorable coverage by the press, in particular for its ease of use and gentle learning curve. In regard to its conservative design model, Cinnamon is similar to the Xfce, MATE, GNOME 2, and GNOME Flashback desktop environments.
As with many other desktop environments based on GNOME, including Canonical'sUnity, Cinnamon was the result of disapproval and dissatisfaction of the GNOME team's abandonment of a traditional desktop experience in April 2011. Until then, GNOME 2 had included the traditional desktop metaphor, but in GNOME 3, this was entirely replaced with GNOME Shell, which by default lacked a taskbar-like panel and other basic features of a conventional desktop. The elimination of these basic features was unacceptable to the developers of distributions such as Mint and Ubuntu, which are geared to users who wanted interfaces that are familiar and easy-to-use.[2]
To overcome these differences, the Linux Mint team initially set out to develop extensions for GNOME Shell to replace the abandoned features. The results of this effort were known as the "Mint GNOME Shell Extensions" or MGSE. Meanwhile, the MATE desktop environment had also been forked from GNOME 2. Linux Mint 12, released in November 2011, subsequently included both, thereby giving users a choice of either GNOME 3 with the MGSE or a MATE desktop that closely resembled GNOME 2.[3][4]
However, even with MGSE, GNOME 3 was still largely missing the comforts of GNOME 2 and was not well received by the user community. At the time, some of the missing features could not be replaced by extensions, and it seemed that extensions would not be viable in the long run due to concerns of significant changes upstream from the GNOME team. Moreover, the GNOME developers were not willing to cooperate with the wishes of the Mint developers. To give the Mint developers finer control over the development process, GNOME Shell was forked as "Project Cinnamon" in January 2012.[5]
Gradually, the Mint developers adapted various core applications. Beginning with version 1.2, released in January 2012, the window manager of Cinnamon is called Muffin, which was originally a fork of GNOME 3's Mutter.[6] Similarly, since September 2012 (version 1.6 onwards), Cinnamon includes the Nemo file manager which was forked from Nautilus. Nemo was created in response to disapproval of some upstream changes in Nautilus 3.6 that significantly altered the functionality and user interface of the file manager.[7] Cinnamon-Settings, included since May 2013 (version 1.8 onwards), combines the functionality of GNOME-Control-Center with that of Cinnamon-Settings, and made it possible to manage and update applets, extensions, desklets, actions, and themes through Cinnamon-Settings. Gnome-Screensaver was also forked into what is now called Cinnamon-Screensaver.
Since October 9, 2013 (version 2.0.0 onwards), Cinnamon is no longer a frontend of GNOME like Unity or GNOME Shell, but rather a completely independent desktop environment. Although Cinnamon is still heavily built on GNOME technologies and utilizes GTK, it no longer requires GNOME as a dependency in order to be installed.
Further improvements in later versions include a desktop grid, wildcard support in file searches, multi-process settings daemon, desktop actions in the panel launcher, separate processes for desktop handling and file manager in Nemo; an additional desktop panel layout option that offers a more modern looking theme and grouped windows; improved naming for duplicate applications in the menu (i.e. Flatpak vs. deb packages), pinned files in Nemo, touchpad gestures, bulk file rename of multiple files and folders using bulky, customizable context menu items in Nemo called "Actions", the ability to display user profile pictures on the panel, improved multi-monitor support in regard to open windows, better visual indicators in the system notifications tray for VPN connections, and an emphasis on performance improvements.
On November 30, 2023, version 6.0.0 of the Cinnamon desktop was released. This is the first release of Cinnamon to include an experimental Wayland session implementation, along with fractional scaling and AVIF background image support, among other improvements.[8] On June 16, 2024, version 6.2.0 of the Cinnamon desktop was released. This release introduced the ability to add the user profile picture to the panel, along with other improvements.[9]
In 2016,[10] Cinnamon started to use X-Apps,[11] which are a collection of applications developed by the Linux Mint team as an alternative to GNOME Core Applications but intended to work across different GTK-based desktop environments such as but not limited to Cinnamon, Budgie, Pantheon, Unity, MATE, and XFCE; most of these applications have a traditional user interface (UI), for example, using a menu bar instead of a header-bar.[12][13] The Linux Mint team is currently in the process of transitioning development for X-Apps applications from being part of the Linux Mint development process to being a completely independent project.[14] Most of them are forks of GNOME Core Applications:
Timeshift is a system restore utility used to undo undesired system changes through the use of snapshots via BTRFS or rsync.[15]
Blueberry is a graphical frontend for the CLI gnome-bluetooth library.
gnome-online-accounts-gtk is a graphical online account manager for GTK-based desktop environments other than GNOME, due to recent changes in the GNOME Online Accounts package that now requires other desktop environments to be based off GTK4 rather than GTK3.
libxapp is a Python and C-based software library that provides the resources needed for applications in the X-Apps project to work across different desktop environments.
As of 4October2024[update], there is no official documentation for Cinnamon itself.[16] The 2016 documentation for the Cinnamon edition of Linux Mint does have a small chapter on the Cinnamon desktop.[17]
Extensibility
Screenshot of a customized Cinnamon desktop
Cinnamon can be modified by themes, applets, desklets, actions, and extensions. Themes can customize the look of aspects of Cinnamon, including but not limited to the menu, panel, calendar and run dialog. Applets are icons or texts that appear on the panel. Five applets are shipped by default, and developers are free to create their own. A tutorial for creating simple applets is available.[18] Desklets are miniature applications that one can place and run on the desktop, providing quick access to information and functionality. Actions are tasks that can be executed from the context menu of the Nemo file manager. Extensions can modify the functionalities of Cinnamon, such as providing an alternative menu to launch applications or altering the look of the Alt+Tab ↹ window switcher.
Users can find themes, applets, desklets, actions, and extensions from Cinnamon Spices,[19] the official repository where developers can share their creations for users to download and rate.[20]
Overview mode
New overview modes have been added to Cinnamon 1.4. These two modes are "Expo" and "Scale", which can be configured in Cinnamon Settings.[21]
Manjaro Community Editions are maintained by members of the Manjaro community, they offer additional user interfaces over the official releases, including Budgie, Cinnamon, Deepin,[28]i3, MATE, and Sway.[29]
In their review of Linux Mint 17, Ars Technica described Cinnamon 2.2 as "being perhaps the most user-friendly and all-around useful desktop available on any platform."[35]
In their review of Linux Mint 18, ZDNet said "You can turn the Linux Mint Cinnamon desktop into the desktop of your dreams."[36]
In their review of Linux Mint 22, It's FOSS stated that "Linux Mint complements its name as a refreshing offering in the world of Linux distributions. It does not fail to provide useful features while trying to add modern components to the desktop experience."[37]
In computing, a desktop environment (DE) is an implementation of the desktop metaphor made of a bundle of programs running on top of a computer operating system that share a common graphical user interface (GUI), sometimes described as a graphical shell. The desktop environment was seen mostly on personal computers until the rise of mobile computing. Desktop GUIs help the user to easily access and edit files, while they usually do not provide access to all of the features found in the underlying operating system. Instead, the traditional command-line interface (CLI) is still used when full control over the operating system is required.
Xfce or XFCE is a free and open-source desktop environment for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems.
GNOME Files, formerly and internally known as Nautilus, is the official file manager for the GNOME desktop. GNOME Files, same as Nautilus, is a free and open-source software under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License.
Rhythmbox is a free and open-source audio player software, tag editor and music organizer for digital audio files on Linux and Unix-like systems.
ClamTk is a free and open-source graphical interface for the ClamAV command-line antivirus software program for Linux desktop users. It provides both on-demand and scheduled scanning. The project was started by Dave Mauroni in February 2004. As of April 2024, the program is no longer maintained.
A desktop environment is a collection of software designed to give functionality and a certain look and feel to an operating system.
Linux Mint is an Ubuntu-based and Debian-based Linux distribution, it comes bundled with a variety of free and open-source applications. Linux Mint offers three different desktop environments by default; Cinnamon, Xfce, and MATE.
Midori is a free and open-source web browser. In 2019, the Midori project was acquired by the Astian Foundation. After the acquisition, the project became a derivative of the Firefox browser.
Ubuntu releases are made semiannually by Canonical Ltd, its developers, using the year and month of the release as a version number. The first Ubuntu release, for example, was Ubuntu 4.10 and was released on 20 October 2004. Consequently, version numbers for future versions are provisional; if the release is delayed until a different month than planned, the version number will change accordingly.
GNOME 3 is the third major release of the GNOME desktop environment. A major departure from technologies implemented by its predecessors, GNOME 3 introduced a dramatically different user interface. It was the first GNOME release to utilize a unified graphical shell known as GNOME Shell. It also introduced support for the Wayland display protocol and added integration with other key technologies such as Flatpak during its development lifecycle.
GNOME, originally an acronym for GNU Network Object Model Environment, is a free and open-source desktop environment for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems.
GNOME Shell is the graphical shell of the GNOME desktop environment starting with version 3, which was released on April 6, 2011. It provides basic functions like launching applications and switching between windows, and is also a widget engine. GNOME Shell replaced GNOME Panel and some ancillary components of GNOME 2.
Peppermint OS is a Linux distribution based on Debian and Devuan Stable, and formerly based on Ubuntu. It uses the Xfce desktop environment. It aims to provide a familiar environment for newcomers to Linux, which requires relatively low hardware resources to run.
Unity is a graphical shell for the GNOME desktop environment originally developed by Canonical Ltd. for its Ubuntu operating system. It debuted in 2010 in the netbook edition of Ubuntu 10.10 and was used until Ubuntu 17.10. Since 2017, its development was taken over by the Unity7 Maintainers (Unity7) and UBports.
Mutter is a window manager initially designed and implemented for the X Window System, but then evolved to be a Wayland compositor. It became the default window manager in GNOME 3, replacing Metacity which used GTK for rendering. "Mutter" is a combination of "Metacity" and "Clutter".
MATE is a desktop environment composed of free and open-source software that runs on Linux, and other Unix-like operating systems such as BSD, and illumos.
Nemo is a free and open-source software and official file manager of the Cinnamon desktop environment. It is a fork of GNOME Files.
Snap is a software packaging and deployment system developed by Canonical for operating systems that use the Linux kernel and the systemd init system. The packages, called snaps, and the tool for using them, snapd, work across a range of Linux distributions and allow upstream software developers to distribute their applications directly to users. Snaps are self-contained applications running in a sandbox with mediated access to the host system. Snap was originally released for cloud applications but was later ported to also work for Internet of Things devices and desktop applications.
Pop OS is a free and open-source Linux distribution, based on Ubuntu, and featuring a customized GNOME desktop environment known as COSMIC. The distribution is developed by American Linux computer manufacturer System76. Pop!_OS is primarily built to be bundled with the computers built by System76, but can also be downloaded and installed on most computers.
References
↑ "6.2.9". 8 August 2024. Retrieved 8 August 2024.
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