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Cinnamon Gnome-Shell Fork Releases Version 1.2
New submitter Novin writes with exciting news from the Cinnamon project. Quoting the release announcements: "Cinnamon 1.2 is out! All APIs and the desktop itself are now fully stable! I hope you'll enjoy the many new features, the desktop effect, desktop layouts, the new configuration tool, the applets, changes, bug fixes, and improvements that went into this release. This is a huge step forward for Cinnamon."
The release reintroduces desktop effects, fixes a slew of bugs, and introduces a new applet API (fixing a number of issues intrinsic to shell extensions).
Clem has a fantastic mindset compared to many UI developers today, he knows what most users want, he actually reads user forums and responds with attitude of user experience being important. He'll make GNOME3 a useful base desktop
What are you looking for in a UI? There are many options-- menu-driven (where gnome2 really is fantastic, auto-organizing stuff), KDE (not a big fan, seems powerful), Gnome-3/unity (which i can start to see the appeal of if they can polish it some more), and scores of other DE / WMs.
TBQH, ive always preferred Gnome2 over OSX, but that may be because im more used to Gnome2. OSX always makes me feel lost, and inefficient, and stupid.
Hmm. Did you try using it in a coffee shop?
Support the EFF and Creative Commons. The war is coming, and they're supporting you...
I see you ate your herpaderp-ohs this morning.
The KDE3, Gnome2, and XFCE desktop UIs are very useful, and can be quite nice looking. The problem with is (1) lack of applications that are readily accessible to most users (i.e. many Application UIs suck, or aren't sufficiently tailored to novice and sub-novice computer users), (2) Application quality - sorry while some apps (Audacity comes to mind) have pretty damn good quality, others are just too much of a hassle for the desired features (any good video editors? Open Office is ok, but still doesn't compete, I'll take Photo Shop or Corel over Gimp any day... etc.) Kmail, Evolution and FireFox cover most user needs and are as good as their Windows/Mac counterparts, but then we get to (3) PR... Linux just doesn't have the right PR to sell it to the average Joe right now, except in the case of Android, where it is all dolled-up by google.
But complaining about the Desktop UIs? Thinking further, I'd say KDE3, Gnome2 and XFCE are better than Windows or Mac, simply because they have all the critical features of those, plus good multiple-desktop support.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
A good GUI is easy to find. Here goes my recommendation:
1. Are you willing to undergo a learning curve? if yes, then you probably want a window manager like awesome. I've never heard anything but praise for tiling window managers from those who actually use them.
2. If not, try one of the boxen. I recommend fluxbox. It's nice because there's almost nothing to learn. No UI paradigms pushed on you. Add a panel and it has all the GUI complexity of Win95 (which I'm putting forward as a good thing).
You will get crap options though if you go for one of the "big three" (Gnome, KDE, Unity), but nobody says you have to stay. If you prefer a more integrated experience than one of these window managers, then go XFCE.
Sure, they won't spin your desktop like a cube. They won't make your windows close in a puff of smoke. They won't animate everything in 3D. Because it's a desktop, not a fucking video game.
I resent that comment. Nothing about GNOME/Linux/Cinnamon is well-polished!
But complaining about the Desktop UIs? Thinking further, I'd say KDE3, Gnome2 and XFCE are better than Windows or Mac, simply because they have all the critical features of those, plus good multiple-desktop support.
What is multi-desktop support?
Does anyone have a map/categorization type product of the seemingly uncountable UIs?
To the best of my limited knowledge theres a huge correlation in "the UI gets in your face" with CPU/memory/size requirements. There are very few (no?) UIs in the corners of "just gets out of your way but uses huge resources" and "kinda like a 3-d screensaver except its not a screensaver and it uses no resources".
"Usefulness" / "Productivity" seems to correlate with absolutely nothing at all on a global scale, although individuals scream for their own specific favorite.
The continuum of UIs, in order of light to heavy seems to be:
CLI dash and emergency recovery statically linked shells, etc
CLI screen and bash in virtual consoles
CLI emacs in virtual consoles
Ratpoison (I'm toying with RP, it is Very nice)
XFCE (my current desktop of choice)
(I think cinnamon goes in this spot, not entirely sure)
Gnome
KDE
99% of my work (no exaggeration) both at work and home currently is "something small and nearby" with XFCE running a tabbed console/terminal which is SSHed into "something really big and far away" in one virtual window/tab/whatever and another virt window/tab/whatever with firefox + a lot of FF addons/extensions, although I've used everything in the list above at some time in the past 18 or 19 years of linux. Yeah that emacs era was a little awkward...
Did I put cinnamon in the right spot in my little 1-d graph? I'm curious if its actually lighter than XFCE.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Disclaimer: yes, I'm using GNOME 3 with GNOME Shell as devs intended to and I have some ironic laughts about claims that "GS/Unity devs are screwballs and don't know nothing". However, everyone uses tools best for him, so...just use it, don't go around claiming that it's best desktop for now.
However, I have purerly technical question - why not improving GNOME 3 Panel? It's ported, code cleaned up, it's introspectable (you can write JS extentions like for GNOME Shell) and you can still keep all the goodies, including having compiz and friends.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!
Linux has some great UI's I don't know what your on about?
"What Are They Gonna Do When Were All Using Freenet"
I'm a very happy user of xmonad tiling window manager, but there is indeed a big learning curve and a lot of keyboard hitting. I've seen screenshots of beautiful xmonad setups but mine is quite dull and I'm not willing to invest time in learning config-fu to beautify things.
It would be fantastic if someone could make a tiling window manager based distribution ("XMonabuntu"? :-)) that just works out of the box and has some point-and-click configurability and theming support.
"It's cinnamonnamony!"--The Swedish Chef
My other car is a 1984 Nark Avenger.
Workspaces.
What all of the new UIs are missing for my use is grided workspaces. I use a 3x3 grid of workspaces, so I have to stick to LXDE and Compiz for now.
1993: Year of whining that 'ordinary users' will never be able to use a Linux desktop.
This is one of those wonderful headline that will read as utterly bizzare nonsense to most of the world.
Agree, and he's done a great job with Cinnamon. I hope he doesn't suffer from burnout. Trying to do all that while doing the coding must be a lot of work!
And as part of this latest release he's just forked Mutter - the fork is called Muffin. This for me is by far the most interesting aspect of this release.
That might have made a difference. My experience has always been in a business setting, and ominous music would always start playing when i started trying to do actual work on it.
Its also possible that im just not cool enough for Macs.
One advantage of Linux is you have full access to any turd you wish to polish, versus being stuck with someone else's fecal offerings!
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
And there are third party packages for Fedora and Ubuntu!
I don't want to get into the debate of whether or not gnome-shell is an improvement over the traditional desktop. Either way, it was wrong for them to push it unfinished on unsuspecting users. Now I can start promoting linux again, something I've had to stop doing because of all the coolaid drinking that has been going on in the UI space. My wife has been on Fedora 14 and now I can upgrade her without her killing me.
First I thought you meant tiling, which you can have on any desktop using Pytyle, but perhaps you'd be interested in Enlightenment instead? I'm confused as to how the layout of virtual desktops matters -- especially since compiz runs on most WMs.
I've been watching this with interest since it was announced and found myself bitterly disappointed to see that in every screenshot I could find the Cinnamon fork used a variant of the MintMenu. No offense to those who like it, it simply doesn't trip my trigger and I prefer the Gnome 2 menu bar. Is this possible using Cinnamon or do those of us who prefer the old way have to wait for MATE to finish being ported to get "our" desktops back?
Clem, if you're watching these comments, I gotta say that despite vehemently disagreeing with your politics I really appreciate the care you're showing the users of your distro and your willingness to create something that not only works well, but looks good too! Thank you.
--bornagainpenguin
Have a Virgin Mobile USA smartphone? Give VMRoms.com a try!
On the contrary. The GUIs these days (cinnamon included) are looking very polished.
For some reason, the most vocal people here on /. are the ones that hate them, but no-one can deny, they look good.
One thing I know, and that is that I am ignorant...
Why is Cinnamon needed. Hasn't LXDE and/or XFCE filled that void?
'lighter' oversimplifies things. I don't think Cinnamon is any 'lighter' than Gnome shell, it's largely the same compentry with a different UI philosophy applied. Similarly, KDE v. Gnome is a debatable topic as well.
Also, there is WindowMaker, blackbox/derivatives, lxde, e, and tons tons tons more out there too.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Spinning your desktop like a cube is a compiz thing. I've got XFCE working fine with Compiz, and yes, it will spin my desktop like a cube.
Sure, let's avoid the issue. This was from October 2010.
4. Fragmentation
Bad news for Oracle with its "new" Linux: businesses don't want any more Linux choices. On the other hand, this also doesn't bode well for LibreOffice, the OpenOffice fork.
It's not that businesses don't appreciate choice between vendors -- they do. But there's not interested in choosing between half-a-dozen different Linuxes, two or three is much more their speed.
I don't see this as being a big concern. The last important Linux distribution to arise was Ubuntu back in 2004. I don't see any other major new Linux distributions arising in the future for either the desktop or the server. Mobile devices and tablets may be another matter. Android is doing well, but MeeGo may yet turn out to be an important portable Linux, and, who knows, perhaps another one will emerge or an Android or MeeGo variant will emerge.
Well, that's true. Ubuntu is still on top so that's easy for people to pick, right?
Probably the main reason I use linux is the completely awesome UI. It's beautiful - look at the clean elegance of ':(){ :|:& };:' for example!
A lot of people won't ever be able to master a truly powerful user interface. But not everybody can fly a fighter jet! Some people can barely manage tricycles. And there's nothing wrong with that, you know. If you can't fly a fighter jet, or paint masterpieces in oils, you don't need to feel inadequate.
But it's not sensible to claim that an OS is inferior just because some people can't master a pro-grade interface. It's like saying fighter jets suck because they don't have handlebars with a jingle bell on them.
So, if someone still requires a mouse, hey, they can have a rewarding career without mastering computers, for instance in the food service industry, and we should all respect that. But let's not pretend that bolting training wheels on linux is an important task. The only GUIs on linux that are actually important are the creative interfaces, such as the GIMP. And (unsurprisingly) the GIMP is (at least) as hard to master as bash or ksh.
That's always possible. Do you shop at GAP? Not doing so could be your problem. Our coporate philosophy has always been to make people look like Justin Long.
-Sent from my Iphone. Tim
I think I'm with you on this. I've used a few OS's*, and so far, I find Gnome 2 to be the most productive. I'm not saying it's perfect, and there are some great features in Gnome 3 and Unity which I would dearly like in Gnome 2 (type to open application, shortcuts for running applications, snap to top/sides) and I like Ubuntu's idea for application-specific menu searching, too.
But, for me, there are reasons that gnome 2 remains better. I can move the mouse around the whole screen without any surprises. No pop-out bars, nor will the application suddenly fade out and minimise. I like that! Maybe it's just me, but I tend to throw the mouse up to various corners to get to menus and close buttons - I thought that was idea of having these things in these places.
Then there is multiple workspace working. When I'm working on a project, I have my 4th workspace with the application and the soon-to-be-completed final product (maybe impress or scribus), then on the 1st workspace I have my sources (files, firefox, pdfs). On the 2nd and 3rd workspaces I have the software which acts as an intermediary (i.e. gimp, libreoffice writer/calc). The workspace switcher is key to being able to move files between workspaces, and I find this very broken in gnome-shell.
And what about the 'places menu'? When I switched from XP to Gnome 2, I loved how organised, uncluttered and easy it was to access the entire system. I think gnome 3 has taken 'uncluttered' too far - like the Win XP start menu, which nested menus within menus within menues, requiring actually a decent amount of effort to successfully navigate without having to start over. 'Places' is where I often go when starting work - after all, unless I complete the work in one sitting, the actual incomplete work is where I will want to look when my OS loads up.
Handheld computing has gone the same way. The Psion 3a and 5mx understood that files are key to people who want to use their machines for actual work. Applications and files held a similar importance on the desktop. When it came to replacing these machines, I naiveley thought that a computer with a keyboard and screen would do. But my Nokia E90 (based on the same OS) didn't get this, and I always needed to go via applications to get to the files. My N900 needs me to bookmark my files in the web-browser in order for me to be able to place a shortcut on the desktop!
When did files become so dirty?
I'm not sure if cinnamon will address my needs - but it looks promising.
D
*Just for fun...SIBO, EPOC, symbian, Workbench 3.0, RiscOS, DOS, Win 3.1/95/98/Me/XP/7, Mac OS 9, X, Gnome 2 & 3, Unity. I've yet to give KDE a fair chance, after booting up PClinuxOS, and not understanding why an OS would want to ape Windows to the point of even fading to monochrome when selecting shutdown, and then oddly returning all the colour when you actually click on the shutdown button.
The complaint against gnome has nothing to do with looks. In fact, anyone who says otherwise is a prime candidate for a troll-tag. At the same time, usability has gone to shit with gnome3. That's the complaint against gnome. For whatever reason, the gnome developers decided that we're all really fucking stupid and that after spending lots of money on nice keyboards and monitors what everyone really wants to do is throw all that away to use it as a really brain dead touch screen computer. For whatever reason, the gnome developers believe people don't actually want to use a mouse and keyboard, but rather want to throw away three decades of smart interface evolution just so we have have a vastly inferior smart phone and/or tablet interface. And to top it all off with, if you disagree, it only validates the opinion gnome developers have for you; meaning you're an idiot.
Gnome3 is real world validation that the gnome3 developers are either retarded and mentally impaired is some way.
Ubuntu is still on top
It is not now nor has it ever been on top. Fedora is the most widely-used distro and has been for a long time. Ubuntu fans just make the most noise.
I like something that stands between OS X and Gnome (or KDE). In Linux since the late 1990s, I've used FVWM 95, Window Maker, AfterStep, GNOME 1.x, KDE 2 ~ 4.something, then back to GNOME 2.x because of some specific weaknesses in KDE which seem to have since been fixed. At work, I use a Mac (mostly) and a Linux machine running Ubuntu 10.04/GNOME.
I like the OS X dock a lot and use Avant Window Navigator on my Linux machines. I also moved the window buttons to the other side (Mac-style) for consistency. Any app that I use much, I put in the dock. For ones I don't use much, I like having a menu rather than the Finder->Applications approach on the Mac. On a small screen (laptop) I like the Mac-style menu bar. On a big screen (like the 24" dual monitors I use) I like the menus in the app window (Linux/Windows style).
Overall, I think OS X is the best desktop, but it would be better if it had an app menu and if it allowed me to configure whether the menu bar was global or in the app window.
I like having the notification area in the dock (AWM style) rather than in the menu bar (Mac style).
Since Apple is unlikely to either change their UI or make it configurable in that way, I find myself generally able to get closer to my ideal on Linux, and applaud the Cinnamon and Mate projects. These recent moves by GNOME (3) and Ubuntu (Unity) to create UIs that tell me how it's gonna be and that I ought to shut up and like it, instead of giving me a UI that I can configure how I want it to be, are wrong on so many levels, the greatest of which is that it's just not the Linux Way.
No, that's not true at all. KDE 3.x was a quite good UI. KDE 4.x has (finally) matured to the point of being >= 3.x (at least in every area that matters to me). Gnome 2.x is decent out of the box, and let's me tweak it to be really good. My only beef there is that the tweaking is harder/requires more expertise than it should. Fortunately, I have that expertise. A new user might not, or even know where to find the info.
With GNOME 3, it's not that it's necessarily a bad UI per se. It has some interesting ideas, and some things that will seem fairly familiar to Mac users. My big complaint with GNOME 3 is that it's almost completely non-configurable, which means that I can't take the points about it that I don't like and change them so that I do like them (and no, writing extensions does not count as "configurable"). Granted, KDE 4 was like that in the beginning, too. I regarded it as pretty much unusable and eventually moved back to GNOME because of that. It's possible that GNOME 3 is also just in that young-and-incomplete space. It might be much better 2 or 3 years from now. In the meantime, we have Cinnamon and Mate as alternatives.
Or it might not be, in which case Cinnamon and Mate will be alternatives for a long time to come.
However, it is simply untrue to say that Linux hasn't had a decent UI yet. If you still doubt me, go spend some time using Windows, then come back and use Linux again. Among the three major OSes, Windows has by far the worst UI.
My critical path doesn't usually include desktop pro's and con's; my enthusiasm for such questions was exhausted by the great vi vs. emacs crusades in the days of yore.
The recent Canonical debacle with Unity has shaken me out of my complacency. In the early days of desktop linux I flirted with both KDE and Gnome before standardizing on Gnome because it felt easier and I wanted to devote my thought energy to other matters (no disrespect, KDE, it's just how I went on a whim way back then).
And so I stayed for about 12 years. But when I upgraded to oneiric this fall and was slapped in the face by the perversion of nature that is Unity, I tried to revert to Gnome only to find it had atrophied and bloated to near Windows-suck levels. So I started shopping around. Sure, I flirted with the idea of CLI-only, but GUIs do occasionally have value. Then I switched to xfce and haven't looked back. It feels like I got a hardware upgrade.
Some of my peripheral applets are gone, but next to the general performance gain it's a price worth paying.
Once again, my faith in the utter superiority of OSS has been confirmed. In Windoze or Applez land you dance to their tune or else. In Linux, you can be continually born again. Speciation is good.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
"Gnome 3", Apple, Micrososft, facebook, slashdot, british royals, etc...
Hmmm, I respectfully disagree.
I hated the initial incarnations of gnome-shell (buggy as hell) but I've been using it for about a month now, and find I quite prefer it to ye-olde gnome2 panel interface. I like the fact that it relegates a bunch of stuff to the normally-hidden-but-realllly-easy-to-invoke "activities" screen (I use the screen-corner hotspot, so I can just shove my mouse into the corner of the screen and suddenly everything appears). I think in general it's a better design than the old gnome2 one. It feels like it keeps out of my way more, without being inconvenient.
I also dislike some of the excessive "simplicity" and "no customization" attitude—but in practice, this isn't much of an issue, because under the hood it actually seems pretty flexible, and even if customizations aren't exposed to the user by default (I think they should be), they're easy enough to tweak with various tools. So far, I've been able to address almost all of my little nits about the interface pretty simply.
So while I sympathize with those who feel a bit upended by the big interface change, and realize that familiarity is important to many, I'm skeptical of claims that the new shell is somehow inherently worse. I don't think that's true. I think it's just different—and in some ways, better.
We live, as we dream -- alone....
GNOME 3 needs more than polish. Like Unity, it doesn't even work correctly with multiple monitors.
Agreed, I actually like Gnome3.
Disclaimer: I spend most of my time in a Windows environment (not by choice, it's the work I need to do) so when I use one of the modern Linux GUIs it's mostly just to try it out or on friends or relatives' PCs. I've used them, but not for months at a time. I do enjoy them though.
FWIW, if you don't like any of the new stuff and prefer ye olde Gnome2, then Debian is still happy to provide you with an excellent OS.
One thing I know, and that is that I am ignorant...
On the contrary, another benefit to using Linux is that it'z not Polish.
HAHAHHAHAHAH, no serious graphics designer uses Gimp. Although it does rock.