Linux Mint has been trying to get away from Gnome 3 and thy did not even think about Unity as a choice, when it comes to desktop user environment. I came to know about Cinnamon a month ago while I was surfing through Linux blogs. Clement Lefebvre, an official in Linux team is trying to create a custom desktop environment for Linux Mint. It is called Cinnamon. It has been heard that, the first version of Cinnamon has been released officially by Mint team.
In their earlier attempts, they tried to create a decent desktop environment by modernizing Gnome3. They created an extension named MGSE (Mint Gnome Shell Extension), which is being used in Linux Mint 12. Clement was not really happy with MGSE, and he was trying to work on that unhappy parts. He once posted in the Linux Mint forums:
“I am not gonna argue whether Gnome shell is good or bad. But I would definitely say that it is not what we’ve been looking for. Gnome team is not offering the exact desktop environment, which it has been providing for many years. Many core features are lacking in Gnome Shell, and we needed to add them into previous editions with the help of extensions together with MGSE.”
With this Cinnamon release, API and desktop are going to be fully stable. But this is not the only product that is being planned to be launched. It is sure that they are looking forward to build a completely new desktop environment with new themes, extensions, applets, comments and user ratings.
With this Cinnamon release, it can easily be concluded that it will be the base for Linux Mint 13. Now with recent updates, Linux Mint has overthrown Ubuntu in some parts of the battle. Now the game is between the two major Linux Distros. Lets wait for a tough competition between Unity and feature rich Cinnamon.
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About Amal Murali