Linux Mint 18 (based on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS), Debian 9 'Stretch', Fedora 24 Release History Release historyĬinnamon now a complete desktop environment Although Cinnamon is still built on GNOME technologies and uses GTK+, it no longer requires GNOME itself to be installed. Since October 2013 (version 2.0 onwards), Cinnamon is no longer a frontend on top of the GNOME desktop like Unity or GNOME Shell, but a discrete desktop environment in its own right. Gnome-Screensaver was also forked and is now called Cinnamon-Screensaver. Cinnamon-Control-Center, 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 and themes through the control-center. Similarly, since September 2012 (version 1.6 onwards), Cinnamon includes the Nemo file manager which was forked from Nautilus. Beginning with version 1.2, released in January 2012, Cinnamon's window manager is Muffin, which was originally a fork of GNOME 3's Mutter. Gradually, various core applications were adapted by the Mint developers. To give the Mint developers finer control over the development process, GNOME Shell was forked as 'Project Cinnamon' in January 2012.

Moreover, the GNOME developers were not amenable to the needs of the Mint developers. 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. However, even with MGSE, GNOME 3 was still largely missing the comforts of GNOME 2 and was not well received by the user community. Linux Mint 12, released in November 2011, subsequently included both, thereby giving users a choice of either GNOME 3-with-MGSE or a traditional GNOME 2 desktop. Meanwhile, the MATE desktop environment had also been forked from GNOME 2. The results of this effort were the 'Mint GNOME Shell Extensions' (MGSE). To overcome these differences, the Linux Mint team initially set out to develop extensions for the GNOME Shell to replace the abandoned features. The elimination of these elementary features was unacceptable to the developers of distributions such as Mint and Ubuntu, which are addressed to users who want interfaces that they would immediately be comfortable with. GNOME 2) had included the traditional desktop metaphor, but in GNOME 3 this was replaced with GNOME Shell, which lacked a taskbar-like panel and other basic features of a conventional desktop. Like several other desktop environments based on GNOME, including Canonical's Unity, Cinnamon was a product of dissatisfaction with GNOME team's abandonment of a traditional desktop experience in April 2011. With respect to its conservative design model, Cinnamon is similar to the XFCE and GNOME 2 (MATE and GNOME Flashback/Classic) desktop environments. As the distinguishing factor of Linux Mint, Cinnamon has generally received favorable coverage by the press, in particular for its ease-of-use and gentle learning curve. Applets and desklets are no longer compatible with GNOME 3. Separation from GNOME was completed in Cinnamon 2.0, which was released in October 2013.

Following several attempts to extend GNOME 3 such that it would suit the Linux Mint design goals, the Mint developers forked several GNOME 3 components to build an independent desktop environment. The development of Cinnamon began as a reaction to the April 2011 release of GNOME 3 in which the conventional desktop metaphor of GNOME 2 was abandoned in favor of GNOME Shell. Cinnamon is the principal desktop environment of the Linux Mint distribution but is available as an optional desktop for other Linux distributions and other Unix-like operating systems as well. Cinnamon is a free and open-source desktop environment for the X Window System that derives from GNOME 3 but follows traditional desktop metaphor conventions.

Linux mint desklets