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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!
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!
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.
What is Croonchy Stars?
I'll take obscure breakfast cereals for $400
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."
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
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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.
I wanted to like it, I really did. I tried it for a while, gave it a long time and forced myself to learn to work with activities, customize the dash, etc.,etc. There are some things that I like about it. Unfortunately, it comes down to usability. While I *can* get stuff done with it, it always takes longer. Too much clicking and moving back and forth in the GUI for the stuff I do. Same complaint I had about Windows Explorer in Windows 7 - it was an improvement, but it requires extra clicks and selections to get to what I need. What's wrong with the UI designers? Don't they use their own stuff?
So I'm using XFCE after years of using mainly Gnome. Not as pretty, some things I don't like about it, but it keeps me productive and takes less time to customize. Maybe I'll try out this Cinnamon thing and see how it does.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
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...
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.
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.
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....