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 favor of GNOME Shell. As the distinguishing factor cinnamon roll casserole 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. 2, released in January 2012, Cinnamon’s window manager is Muffin, which was originally a fork of GNOME 3’s Mutter. 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 right. Although Cinnamon is still built on GNOME technologies and uses GTK, it no longer requires GNOME itself to be installed.

Nemo, and a focus on performance improvements. Volume and brightness adjustment using scroll wheel while pointing at the respective taskbar icon. As of 24 January 2012 there was no official documentation for Cinnamon itself, There is documentation for the Cinnamon edition of Linux Mint, with a chapter on the Cinnamon desktop. New overview modes have been added to Cinnamon 1. These two modes are “Expo” and “Scale”, which can be configured in Cinnamon Settings. Cinnamon can be modified by themes, applets and extensions. Themes can customize the look of aspects of Cinnamon, including but not limited to the menu, panel, calendar and run dialog.

Applets are icons or texts that appear on the panel. Five applets are shipped by default, and developers are free to create their own. A tutorial for creating simple applets is available. Developers can upload their themes, applets and extension to Cinnamon’s web page and let users download and rate. Also available for EndeavourOS, which uses Arch repositories. Cinnamon is available as a spin or is available in the Fedora repositories.