Slashdot Mirror
Cinnamon 1.6 Brings New Features and Applets
An anonymous reader wrote in with news that the GNOME Shell fork, Cinnamon, released version 1.6 yesterday. The release features persistent (and nameable) workspaces, a window list applet, greatly improved notifications (they're collected in one place), improved task switchers and audio control, workspace flipping while dragging windows, and integration with their fork of Nautilus. See the release announcement for more and lots of screenshots (detailed source changelog). From the looks of it, this release is closer than ever to merging the modern Gtk3/GNOME stack with the missing functionality from previous windowing environments.
The Cinnamon developers are working hard to make a UI that is useful to the user, and that can be a part of either single task or multiple task workflow. The GNOME3 developers try to cram their views down the user's throat, and impede anyone with a multiple-task workflow. moreover, the GNOME3 devs attitude is, you want something different that used to be user-configurable before, get a developer! GNOME3 and its developers can now die, they serve no purpose and the useful work has been taken up by competent people.
Here's a demo video that shows the new changes and features.
It looks to me like they have something pretty close to the ultimate version of the Windows 95-like UI. If this had been around with this amount of polish a year ago I probably would have switched to Mint. Now that I've gotten used to Unity I don't know if I'll switch. Great work anyway!
There is also MATE which is a fork of GNOME2 that looks great.
LMDE is actually the first linux desktop that I've used for an extended period of time because I can stand it. (And it brought me over from OS X when I upgraded that laptop). I never liked how Ubuntu locked to releases and much preferred the Debian rolling release. I've run testing on my servers for years but there had never been a desktop that I really liked until MATE or Cinnamon came along.
My girlfriend is on Ubuntu because "I hate windows and I heard about Ubuntu" but is getting fed up with "New release. Guess what we MOVED EVERYTHING AGAIN!". I don't understand how people use Unity. I have 22 windows open right now all doing something and like switching between them without pretending I'm on a tablet.
Props to the Linux Mint guys. The ones that may actually push Linux onto the desktop.