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Overview
Cinnamon is a desktop environment maintained by the Linux Mint team. Forked from GNOME Shell, it provides the user with panels, menus, window management, hot corners, and more. The user-interface is written in JavaScript, with core libraries being written in C.
Features
Panel
Cinnamon provides a traditional desktop experience out-of-the-box, with a panel that resembles the taskbar of Microsoft Windows. Panel items — called "applets" — can be organized freely. Additional applets can be downloaded from the internet, either from the Spices website or the applet manager included with Cinnamon.
Spices
A "Spice" is Cinnamon's name for an add-on applet, desklet, theme, widget, and more. They can be found at the Cinnamon Spices repository website.
Cinnamon applications
Cinnamon uses the X-app suite, which are a set of apps forked from GNOME and changed to work across XFCE, Cinnamon and MATE.
| Application | GNOME | X-apps equivalent |
|---|---|---|
| Text editor | Gedit | xed |
| Image viewer | Eye of GNOME (EoG) | xviewer |
| Image organizer | gthumb | pix |
| Media player | Totem | xplayer |
| Document editor | Atril | xreader |
Starting Cinnamon
There are two main methods of starting Cinnamon:
- Selecting "Cinnamon" from your preferred Display Manager
- If your session crashes or has graphical artifacts you should select "Cinnamon (software rendering) instead, which disables 3D acceleration
- Modifying your Xinitrc to include
exec cinnamon-session