The development of Cinnamon began by the Linux Mint team as a reaction to the April 2011 release of GNOME 3 in which the conventional desktop metaphor of GNOME 2 was abandoned in cinnamon roasted butternut squash of GNOME Shell. 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. 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. To overcome these differences, the Linux Mint team initially set out to develop extensions for the GNOME Shell to replace the abandoned features.

Meanwhile, the MATE desktop environment had also been forked from GNOME 2. However, even with MGSE, GNOME 3 was still largely missing the comforts of GNOME 2 and was not well received by the user community. 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. Moreover, the GNOME developers were not amenable to the needs of the Mint developers. To give the Mint developers finer control over the development process, GNOME Shell was forked as “Project Cinnamon” in January 2012. Gradually, various core applications were adapted by the Mint developers.

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