Cinnamon Desktop
Cinnamon is a free and open-source desktop environment by the Linux Mint team with a traditional and easy to navigate design model and is similar to the Xfce, MATE, and GNOME 2. Cinnamon was a product of dissatisfaction with GNOME team's abandonment of a traditional desktop experience in April 2011. 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. Cinnamon is still built on GNOME technologies and uses GTK, however, it no longer requires GNOME itself to be installed.
There are some core features that all desktop environments try to fulfill while offering additional features. In the case of Cinnamon and MATE, both are inspired by GNOME 2, you can find a lot of similarities. Linux Mint Cinnamon features Nemo file manager. It’s a lightweight file manager and uses GNOME Terminal as the default terminal emulator.
Versions
- Linux Mint 17 ships with Cinnamon 2.2
- Linux Mint 21 ships with Cinnamon 5.4
To determine which version of Cinnamon Desktop you have on your Linux Mint installation do the following:
- From the System Information search for or click on “system info” in your system’s Mint Menu.
Menu Editing
Welcome to a weakness in Cinnamon and linux desktop environments in general, the complexity of trying to customize and edit system and shell menus.
mintmenu is a MATE specific package. It (and Mozo) and preinstalled in a Cinnamon desktop as Cinnamon uses mate-panel to provide it's fallback session to give a usable desktop in the event of a Cinnamon crash.
Cinnamon panel applets are written in Cinnamon JavaScript - the stock ones found in /usr/share/cinnamon/applets are installed with the package cinnamon-common Cinnamon's menu editor is cinnamon-menu-editor
