Now that we’ve finished up three very popular desktop environments, it is time to move on to the final, and less known one: Cinnamon. Based on on the GTK+ 3 toolkit, Cinnamon was originally a fork of the GNOME desktop. After the release of GNOME 3, the development team for Cinnamon was unsure about the future of the project, as GNOME was heading in a different direction than what the team wanted. When Cinnamon 2 was released, it became it’s own full desktop environment with some GNOME components; however, Cinnamon does not require that GNOME be installed to use (1). The version of Cinnamon that will be reviewed today is on Linux Mint 18.1. There is no documentation for Cinnamon, but most of the GNOME documentation applies.
Figure 1: The Cinnamon Desktop (enlarge)
The Cinnamon desktop is very sleek and customize-able. When the user first login to the Cinnamon desktop, all there is to see on the screen is a taskbar at the bottom, and a couple desktop links. There is a “start menu” very similar to the Window’s start menu. The user can use the Super key to toggle opening it. After the menu is open a user can begin typing the name of an application to search for it just like in Unity. Next to the start menu are shortcuts to applications, open applications, and system widgets. The user can change which desktop links appear by default under System Settings -> Desktop, but it usually is just the home and root folders. Cinnamon comes with multiple workspaces that users can switch in between using the same keyboard shortcuts as one would in Unity, Ctrl+Alt+Arrow Keys. One flaw is that there are no workspaces widgets on the taskbar, which in some desktop environments displays what the user has open on other workspaces. One keyboard shortcut that offers a solution to this problem is Ctrl+Alt+Up. Once a user pressed this shortcut, the workspaces spread out in a tile fashion. Ctrl+Alt+Down will do the same, but with the windows open on your current workspace.
Figure 2: The Workspace Switcher (Ctrl+Alt+Up) (enlarge)
Desktop effects are changeable, such as how windows open, close, and transition. These settings are available under System Settings -> Effects. You can also change the theme of the environment under System Settings -> Themes. Linux Mint comes with a couple choices, and in the screenshots I have taken I am using Mint-Y-Dark. Cinnamon allows the user to change the theme of the window borders, icons, controls, mouse pointer, and desktop all separately; this allows for a mix-and-match of themes to your preference. There are many more settings that users can change in the System Settings tool.
Figure 3: The Theme chooser (enlarge)
The Cinnamon desktop is very speedy, almost on par with Xfce; although I do not have measures of the speed, and this is purely subjective. It would be interesting to see if there are any differences in speed of opening applications, closing windows, etc. when measured.
The Cinnamon desktop is a very modern feeling environment, with most of the same features as the other environments reviewed so far. Cinnamon comes out of the box with more common sense keybindings than both Xfce and KDE, similar to Unity. Personally, I enjoy the Cinnamon desktop environment, I just wish that it had better documentation. Next week I will be concluding this blog with a comparison of each of the environments reviewed; that is, Unity, KDE, Xfce, and Cinnamon.b
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinnamon_(software)