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).

Comments

great to see a UI centered on most user needs

[iggymanz]

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

Re:great to see a UI centered on most user needs

[EponymousCustard]

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!

Map / categorization

[vlm]

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.

Just technical question

[Pecisk]

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.