14 DAY TRIAL // The final release of the Cinnamon 3.0 desktop environment was launched last week, tagged as ready for deployment as part of the upcoming Linux Mint 18 "Sarah" operating system.
As usual, we were the first to report on its new features. We thus know that, being a major release and all that, Cinnamon 3.0 packs a few interesting goodies, such as a brand new Sound settings panel rewritten in Python, support for muting all volume controls at once, or the renaming of the "Natural scrolling" Touchpad option to "Reverse scrolling direction."
Other exciting new features introduced in Cinnamon 3.0 include the ability to disable all extensions at once, two-finger scrolling and edge-scrolling support for modern laptops, the ability to rename battery powered devices, better GTK 3.20 support, as well as many useful window management and accessibility tweaks.
While it's a well-known fact that the Cinnamon desktop environment is designed to be deployed only on Linux Mint operating systems, it can also be easily installed on Ubuntu OSes, because Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu Linux. So it's now possible to install Cinnamon 3.0 on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and Ubuntu 15.10.
Here's how to install Cinnamon 3.0 in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS or 15.10
To install the Cinnamon 3.0 desktop environment in the Ubuntu 16.04 LTS or Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werewolf) operating system - though the latter will be supported by Canonical with software updates and security fixes for a couple of months, until July 2016 - you'll need to add the following PPA (Personal Package Archive).
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:embrosyn/cinnamon
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo apt-get install cinnamon
Once you've executed all the above-mentioned commands in the Terminal app, one by one hitting the Enter key after each one, and everything is successfully installed, you can enter the Cinnamon session. You can do that by logging out and choosing "Cinnamon" from the login screen, by clicking on the small Ubuntu logo located on the right side of the username.
That's it, you can now enjoy the Cinnamon 3.0 desktop environment on your Ubuntu 16.04 LTS or Ubuntu 15.10 operating system. However, if you decide that Cinnamon is not for you, you'll have to execute the following commands in the Terminal app to remove the Cinnamon 3.0 installation from your Ubuntu OS.
sudo apt-get install ppa-purge
sudo ppa-purge ppa:embrosyn/cinnamon
