Introducing Cinnamon: The GNOME 3 Replacement

Clement Lefebvre is proud to announce the unique availability of the Cinnamon Project, a GNOME 3 desktop environment fork which offers a traditional layout, its easy to use, powerful, flexible, and provides advanced features.

If you don't like Ubuntu's Unity and/or the controversial GNOME 3 desktop environment, we are introducing today, January 3rd, the jaw-dropping and beautiful Cinnamon desktop environment, forged by the creator of the popular Linux Mint operating system, Clement Lefebvre.

"If you like Linux Mint you’ll probably like Cinnamon," says Clement Lefebvre in the official announcement for Cinnamon. Just like the Linux Mint operating system, Cinnamon shares the same vision and the same philosophy of what a desktop environment should look like.

Cinnamon has everything you've dreamed off, from an easy to use user interface, a familiar layout, to advanced customizations and technologies, allowing you to change it as you like, making you feel at home.

Highlights of Cinnamon:

· Based on GNOME 3 and Mutter, and forked from GNOME Shell;
· Uses one single, auto-hideable bottom panel (will also be movable in the near future);
· Provides window list, systray icons, a "show desktop" button, and all MGSE's features;
· Provides a Main Menu that has the same layout as mintMenu, and offers options to add apps to favorites, to the panel or to the desktop;
· Provides custom panel launchers;
· Provides a sound applet that lets users control and launch your music, to switch the sound from your headphones to your speakers and vice-versa.

The Cinnamon desktop environment - Image courtesy of Clement Lefebvre

The Cinnamon desktop environment - Image courtesy of Clement Lefebvre

Cinnamon is available for the Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot), Linux Mint 12 (Lisa), Fedora 16 (Verne), openSUSE 12.1, and Arch Linux operating systems. It will be soon available, along with MATE and MGSE, on the Linux Mint Debian Edition.

Cinnamon can be easily installed from its official homepage, for the above mentioned Linux distributions, by installing the "cinnamon-session" package. After installation, log out and choose the "Cinnamon" session at the login screen.