| guide | Cinnamon is a nostalgic GNOME 2 Linux desktop environment, which is flexible, fast, and provides a variety of functions. I recently installed Fedora 25 and I feel that the current version of KDE Plasma is not stable. It crashed several times a day before I decided to try another desktop. After installing several other desktops and trying each for a few hours, I finally decided to use Cinnamon until Plasma was patched and stable. Here's what I've found. |
Introduction to Cinnamon
In 2011, GNOME 3 was released with the new GNOME Shell , and the new interface drew immediate positive and negative feedback. Many users and developers liked the original GNOME interface so much that it was forked by several organizations, one of which was Cinnamon.
One of the reasons behind the development of GNOME Shell for GNOME 3 is that many of the original GNOME user interface components are no longer actively developed. This is also a problem with Cinnamon and other GNOME fork projects. The Linux Mint project is a prime mover for Cinnamon, since GNOME is the official desktop environment for Mint. The Mint developers have pushed Cinnamon to the point where it doesn't require GNOME itself, Cinnamon is already a completely self-contained desktop environment that retains many of the features of the GNOME interface that users love.
Reasons to use Cinnamon
- integrated. The choice of desktop does not depend on whether there are applications written for it in the long run. Every application I've ever used, regardless of which desktop it was written for, will run fine on any other desktop, and Cinnamon is no exception. All the libraries needed to run programs written for KDE, GNOME, or other desktops are available to use them smoothly on Cinnamon.
- Exterior. Let's face it, looks are important. Cinnamon has a crisp, clean look that uses an easy-to-read font and color combination. The desktop is not unnecessarily obstructed, you can configure the icons displayed on the desktop using the "System Settings" => "Desktop" menu. This menu also allows you to specify whether to display desktop icons on the primary monitor, the secondary monitor, or all monitors.
- Desktop components. Desktop components are small, single-purpose programs that can be added to the desktop. Only a few are available, but you can choose from CPU or disk monitors, weather applications, sticky notes, desktop albums, time and date, and more. I like the Time and Date desktop component because it's easier to read than the applet in the Cinnamon panel.
- speed. Cinnamon is fast and agile. Programs load and display quickly. The desktop itself also loads quickly at login, although this is my subjective experience and not based on timing tests.
- configuration. Cinnamon is not as configurable as KDE Plasma, but also more configurable than when I first tried it. The Cinnamon Control Center provides centralized access to many desktop configuration options. It has a main window from which configuration windows for specific features can be launched. A new look can be easily selected from the available looks in Themes in System Settings. You can choose window borders, icons, controls, mouse pointers, and desktop base schemes. Other options include fonts and backgrounds. I've found many of these configuration tools to be the best I've come across. It has just the right amount of desktop themes to dramatically change the look of your desktop without facing the difficulty of choosing like KDE.
- Cinnamon panel. The Cinnamon panel, or toolbar, is initially very simple to configure. It contains a menu for launching programs, a basic system tray, and an application selector. The panel is easy to configure, and adding new program launchers simply involves locating the program you want to add to the main menu, right-clicking on the program icon, and selecting "Add to Panel." You can also add launcher icons to the desktop itself, as well as to the launch bar in Cinnamon's "Favorites". You can also enter the panel's edit mode and rearrange the icons.
- flexibility. It can sometimes be difficult to find a minimized or hidden running program, and if there are many running applications, it can be challenging to find it on the toolbar's program selector. In part, this is because programs aren't always ordered in the picker making them easy to find, so one of my favorite features is being able to drag the buttons of running programs and rearrange them on the selector. This makes it easier to find and display windows that belong to the program, since they are now where I put them. The Cinnamon desktop also has a really nice popup menu that you can access with a right click. This menu has common tasks such as accessing desktop settings, adding desktop components, and other desktop-related tasks. One of the other menu items is "Create New Document", which uses the
~/Templates
document templates in the directory and lists each of them. Just click on the template you want to use, and documents using that template will be created using the default Office programs. In my case, that's LibreOffice.
- Multiple workspaces. Cinnamon provides multiple desktops like other desktop environments. Cinnamon calls it a "workspace". The workspace selector is located in the Cinnamon panel and presents a window overview of each workspace. Windows can be moved between workspaces or assigned to all workspaces. I did find that the workspace selector was sometimes a little slower than showing window positions, so I switched the workspace selector to show workspace numbers instead of window overviews in workspaces.
- Nemo. Most desktops use their own preferred default programs for various purposes, and Cinnamon is no exception. My preferred desktop file manager is Krusader, but Cinnamon uses Nemo by default, so I used that for testing. I found out that I really like Nemo. It has a beautiful and clean interface, and I like most of its features and use it regularly. It's easy to use while being flexible enough for my needs. Although Nemo is a fork of Nautilus, I found that Nemo was better integrated into the Cinnamon environment. The Nautilus interface doesn't seem to be well integrated with Cinnamon and doesn't work well with Cinnamon.
- stability. Cinnamon is very stable and usable.
Summarize
Cinnamon is a fork of the GNOME 3 desktop that looks like a GNOME desktop like never before. Its development seems to be a logical improvement, and the Cinnamon developers saw a need to enhance and extend GNOME while preserving its unique and much-loved features. It's not GNOME 3 anymore - it's different and better. Cinnamon looks great and works well for me, and switching from KDE, which I still love very much, has been smooth. I've spent a few days learning how Cinnamon's differences can make my desktop experience even better, and I'm very excited to learn about this awesome desktop.
As much as I love Cinnamon, I still like to experience other environments, I'm currently switching to the LXDE desktop and have been using it for a few weeks. I will share my experience with LXDE when I use it for a while.
（题图： Sam Mugraby，Photos8.com. CC BY 2.0）
About the Author:
David Both is a Linux and open source advocate living in Raleigh, North Carolina. He has been in the IT industry for over 40 years, has taught OS/2 for over 20 years at the company where he works at IBM, and wrote the first training course in 1981 for the original IBM PC. He has taught RHCE courses at Red Hat and has worked at MCI Worldcom, Cisco, and North Carolina State. He has been using Linux and open source software for almost 20 years.