We covered Cinnamon desktop 1.0 a few weeks back. Yesterday’s release of version 1.2 has taken us by surprise. We were not expecting another stable release until next month!
Nevertheless, a good desktop is always welcome! This release is a major release for Cinnamon as it removes all dependencies of mutter and hence moves away further from Gnome Shell. On the other hand it starts to resemble Gnome 2 layout even more.
Major changes in this release of Cinnamon includes :
- 2 new animation plugins
- 30 transition styles
- a brand new cinnamon settings menu to change basic settings
- 3 desktop layouts ( traditional, flipped, classic)
- 5 new applets
- improved main menu
- 130 bug fixes
Changes under the hood
- Cinnamon now uses its own window manager (Muffin forks and replaces Mutter in Cinnamon 1.2)
- Cinnamon is no longer compatible with Gnome Shell themes. It is possible however for a theme to define styles for both Gnome Shell and Cinnamon and to be compatible with both desktops.
- Newly open windows are focused by default (instead of appearing in the back with an annoying “Your window is ready” notification)
- Closing windows on an empty workspace no longer triggers the overview.
- The overview was replaced by a desktop Scale plugin (similar to the old Compiz Scale). In future release, this plugin will be associated with CTRL+ALT+DOWN and a new Expo plugin will be mapped to CTRL+ALT+UP.
Installation
Ubuntu PPA
The Ubuntu ppa for Cinnamon is not yet updated. However, it is better to keep the ppa added for easy future upgrades.
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:merlwiz79/cinnamon-ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install cinnamon muffin
Direct Download
You can download individual .deb files and install by double clicking on the .deb files. You would need all the files listed below to install Cinnamon.
Muffins ( .tar.gz file . it includes all the files )
CLI command
sudo dpkg -i cinnamon_1.2*.deb *muffin*.deb
Uninstalling
If you do not like Cinnamon, you can uninstall the ppa using the following command.
sudo ppa-purge
ppa:merlwiz79/cinnamon-ppa
If you have installed only the .deb files then
sudo apt-get remove –purge cinnamon muffin
sudo apt-get autoremove –purge
Great stuff. I've been using Cinnamon since December, and love it. Hopefully, I'll figure something out with themes, because it was nice being able to use Gnome shell themes. Deviantart is starting to collect Cinnamon themes though, and most of them are pretty awesome.
Side note: I can't get the damn snowman overlay to close, and it is really annoying to read through it.