 the desktop environment you use is going to be a very personal choice. Luckily, there are many different ones to choose from, though most people end up using the one that comes with their disrobe choice. But if you're looking for a new desktop environment, cinnamon might be a good choice for you. So today, I'm going to actually take you through some things about cinnamon and ask the question, is it good? So first, let's talk a little bit about the history of the cinnamon desktop. I don't normally do this, but I'm trying something new. So the cinnamon desktop was initially released in 2011 by the Linux Mint team. So primarily, this is a Linux Mint focused project, but it has been adopted and is available on many different distros, including Ubuntu, Arch, Fedora, you get the idea. The developers behind Linux Mint were not happy with Get Home 3 when it first came out. And like many other developers just decided to do their own thing. Now, initially, they did try to extend GNOME 3 to focus on the way they wanted to do things. However, they were not successful. So eventually, they decided to fork several GNOME components in an effort to create a new desktop environment, which they ended up calling cinnamon. Now they took cues from GNOME 2, because they kind of liked the way GNOME 2 worked. But they wanted to maintain many of the more modern features that GNOME 3 shipped with. By the time version 2.0, cinnamon was released. All of the reliance on GNOME outside of the GTK components were gone and it became a independent desktop environment. Since then, cinnamon has constantly innovated with new features, including more modern underlying technologies like GTK4. Cinnamon suite of applications has also widened to include many different custom applications like the Nemo file manager, which started off as a fork of Nautilus, but has since become an independent project. When it comes to look and feel, which I'll talk more about here as we go along, it really can't be denied that cinnamon looks and feels and works a lot like Windows when it comes to functionality. Along the bottom, you have a panel on the left hand side. You have a menu on the right hand side. You have icons, which include shortcuts for your network, for your clipboard, for your time and clock and calendar and all that stuff. Outside of the initial impression, you'll find that cinnamon offers many different animations effects, rounded corners, editable panels with widgets and a lot more. One of the key differentiators between cinnamon and GNOME is the customized ability of the whole thing. Whereas with GNOME, you really don't get a lot of customization options. Now it has improved in recent versions, but it's still very much a controlled ship. What it looks like is what it looks like. With cinnamon, that's not the case. You have options to customize basically everything, including where the panel is, where everything is on the panel. The theming, which I'll talk a lot about later, is very good. And you add in a system for extensions and being able to add desktop widgets and applets to the bar. You can just kind of get the sense that this is a very customizable desktop environment. Whereas with GNOME, you don't get that sense at all unless you do quite a bit of work in order to make it that way. So let's go ahead and do a little bit of a deep dive on the cinnamon desktop. I'm going to show you what mine looks like. I've spent a little bit of time customizing it, but not a lot. And I'm going to show you just how customizable it is and some of the main features. So let's go ahead and jump into that. So this is the cinnamon desktop. Now, basically, all I've done here is changed the accent color, given it a dark mode and changed the wallpaper. That's basically all I've done. If you were to download cinnamon on your distro of choice, you would have yours look something similar to this unless the distro has changed it. So basically, if you've downloaded Linux Mint, you're going to see this only with the Linux Mint wallpaper. So out of the box, like I said, you're going to get a panel along the bottom and some icons on the desktop. That's basically it. And like I said, this is a very Windows-esque workflow. Along the bottom here, you have a menu system. You have some launchers, which are quick launchers and also indicate your running application. So if you have Firefox and Nemo open, it underlines them and shows that they're open. Along the right hand side here, you have icons for your volume network, your update manager and the clipboard. I've added the weather applet as well. And then also you have the time, which if you click on gives you access to a calendar and your events. So that's the panel. It's very simple out of the box, but it's very extensible. So if you wanted to, you could right click on it and click applets. And there are by default several installed applets that you can add to the bar. Things like the calendar, the display for monitor control, your favorites, which is going to be these icons here, keyboard layout, your menu, your network manager, notifications, and so on and so forth. And it's easy just to add these to the bar if you wanted to add them. And if there's an applet here that you don't have, you can go to the download thing here. And it will actually allow you to download what looks to be maybe close to 100 different applets that you can download and add to your bar, many of them for interesting and complex things, things like an SSH launcher to allow you to connect to SSH hosts, KDE connective, which is the KDE tool to connect to your Android phone, a screenshot button so you can take screenshots from your system just by clicking a button, time shift and so on and so forth. There's just so much here that you could add. And basically what that means is that you can make your bar your own. It's really, really nice. Now, this differs when it comes to GNOME because the panel in GNOME is very uncustomizable, unless you do a ton of work for it, download a whole bunch of extensions and things like that. In addition to adding applets, you can also obviously change a lot of stuff about the panel itself. So if you go into panel settings, you can change its height so that it's bigger and smaller, like so you can change how the font and color icons behave, along with the icon size, you can also change whether or not the panel hides when there's a window near it. So that's also very customizable. So if you wanted to move the panel, you could just right click on it, click move, it would highlight the areas where the panel can go, then you just click the place you want the panel and it will move right there. Now, it's not the most intuitive way of moving a panel around. If you've ever used KDE before, you'll know that dragging it is just as possible in KDE. So that's a possibility in other desktop environments here, it's just a click. Now, I don't know really which one or which way is better dragging it or just clicking it. Maybe clicking is more efficient. I really can't say I will say that it's not intuitive because the first thing I tried to do was drag it and that's not something that really works. So that's the panel. Let's go ahead and talk now about the settings. If you've ever used XFCE before, this will look somewhat familiar. This actually looks a lot like the XFCE settings manager. The one thing that is a little bit different is that it's more modernly designed than the XFCE manager, but it does resemble it quite a bit. Now, in this application, you're going to find all of your settings things like font selection and choosing a background, your account details, choosing the applets for the bar is also in here, creating workspaces is here, the settings for windows tiling is here, online accounts, so on and so forth. All the stuff is going to be right in this panel. Now, most of the stuff here is just going to be traditional desktop environment settings, things that are basically uninteresting things like display settings and accessibility settings and languages and stuff like that. The essentials are here, well represented and easy to use. There are a few things that I'd like to point out and kind of bring to the forefront. The first one is going to be themes. Now, this is where cinnamon really differs from GNOME. Outside of the customizability of the panel, you also have access to themes. Now, out of the box, you get quite a few of them. And they're all variations on a theme. So you're not going to have like a ton of really odd GTK themes installed by default. That's just not the way it works. They have one main theme, but they all have different colors and you can mix and match them if you want. So that the panels, one color, the highlight colors on the windows are different colors. You can do all that stuff. It's really nice. It also has Adwaita installed by default. It's an old version of Adwaita, as far as I can tell. And you can know that because they're still using those ugly, I guess that's brown icons, but whatever, you don't have to use it. It's not by default. You can choose any of these that you want. Now, like I said, you can mix and match how these things work. So you can choose to have blue icons and you can have the rest of your system have a purple accent color and have the desktop have a red accent color if you wanted to. That's perfectly fine. You can mix and match as much as you want with the install themes as you want. Now, if the install themes don't really suit it for you, you can go up to the add and remove section here, and you can see that there are several themes that you can download and apply. So things like adapt us. So if I wanted to apply that one, I hit the download button. And theoretically, it should be here in the themes, I could go to the icons and see if we have adapted here now, which we don't that much just mean this one here. Yep, right here, this is adapted. And that's what the adaptive theme looks like, then you could try to find icons and stuff that would go along with that. Some of the themes have more complete settings than others. So some of them come with icons, some of them don't come with icons. And obviously, if you want, you can install themes outside of this panel as well, you can install them into the dot themes directory inside your home directory, or inside of user slash share slash themes if you want, that will also work. The next thing that I want to point out is the effects panel. So this allows you to change the effects of the way the desktop environment works. So things like animations, the animation speed, blur effects, window effects, things like that, all that stuff is controlled here, and is not overly done. So what I mean by that is like, if you've used KDE before, you know that it comes with a ton of kwin effects. And there are a ton of more kwin effects that you can add. And there's a ton of settings when it comes to animations and blur and all this stuff, it can get very, very overwhelming with cinnamon. It has a lot of features for effects, as you can see, but it doesn't overwhelm you. There's just a few here and they're all represented by on off switches. If you don't like it, turn it off. You like it, leave it on really as simple as that. The last thing I want to point out while I'm here is the extensions. Now, if you click on this, you'll see that it doesn't have any extensions by default. So you'd have to download them that can be done in this panel here. And there are a ton of extensions. So it's unlike the GNOME extensions ecosystem, where you'll find maybe thousands of extensions, most of them un-maintained and horrible or broken, probably the better way to describe it. Here, you'll find just maybe two dozen different extensions that do very interesting things. So like allowing you to add complete tiling to cinnamon if you wanted to. So G-tiles here, things like transparent panels, which is really nice. If you wanted to add that, you could do this. And now that that's here, you can now see that my panel is completely transparent, simple as that. And that's really nice. Like I said, there's not a lot of them, but the ones that are here are very useful. So you can also add wobbly windows if you want to. So we'll download that, just show you one more thing, click on that, click plus. And now I show, look at that wobbly windows. It doesn't really work all that great in a VM. I'm just, that's obviously something that's more used to something that has its own GP. But you get the idea, wow, that is really broken. Let's turn that off. Let's just hit the minus. And then now we should not have, yeah, all that stuff is now gone. Good. Fixed, fixed. Now, so that's extensions. And what like I said, while there's not a lot of them, the ones that are there are really useful, and can allow you to really, truly dive in and customize your desktop environment as much as possible, which is, like I said, very, very nice. So I've talked a couple of times before, as we go through this video about GNOME and KDE. And I want to talk a little bit about versus. I want to compare them just a little bit. Now, when it comes to customizability, GNOME and KDE are on two opposite ends of the spectrum. So on one end, you have GNOME, which is not very customizable at all without some really, you know, tough work. It's not really tough. I just call it tough in when it compares to KDE, which is giving you all the settings you could possibly want all under one gigantic settings panel. And it's very, very confusing because there's like thousands of different settings that you can choose from. And it's just overall kind of a mess. Now, they've done their best to organize it as much as possible. And you can do searches and stuff like that. But when it comes to actually having the options, KDE gives them all to you and empowers you to change whatever you want. It's awesome, but it can be overwhelming with GNOME. You don't get any options at all. And you're kind of stuck with what they give you unless you put some extra true effort into it. Cinnamon sits in the middle of those two. So it has a very sane set of defaults. So if you were to launch into a distro that uses cinnamon and you have that bar along the bottom like we did when we had, when we started the beginning, and you just wanted to use it like that, it's perfectly fine. If you use Mint, which is the primary distro that uses cinnamon, it offers you in the startup application to choose a, if you want to use the dark theme, it allows you to choose the accent color. And if that's all the customization you ever want to do, that's fine. And it would work fantastically. And all the extra customization bits that are here, you never have to use. But it does, if you want, have those options. And they're all very minimal. And by minimal, I just mean in comparison to KDE, which offers everything, the customization options that cinnamon offers are the bare minimum, but take it to the point where it's over what you get with GNOME, if that makes sense. So you're going to have options for blur, but you're only going to have like a couple options for blur. If you want to have options for customizing the panel, you're going to have four or five options instead of, you know, 20 or 30. You know what I mean? You'll have the things that you basically want. The most important things for customizing your desktop are here. The superfluous extra over the top stuff that KDE offers are not here. And really it comes down to how you like to customize your desktop. If you like to have ultimate power over your desktop environment, maybe KDE is still better for you. But if you are the type of person who you want to do some customization, but you don't want to have all that extra stuff, cinnamon is definitely the sweet spot when it comes to that kind of stuff, because it gives you all the stuff that GNOME refuses to give you while going so far like KDE does. So I just wanted to spend a few minutes kind of talking about the the two main distros because KDE and GNOME are like the two main super distros out there. And cinnamon is not nearly as popular, but it does offer the stability and ease of access of GNOME while offering some of the customizability of KDE. So it really does sit right there in the middle. So the last section of the video that I want to talk about is overall usability and who should use cinnamon. So first, overall usability is very good. If you've ever used windows before, cinnamon is very easy to pick up. It has a menu system that's really easy and very well organized. It has the icons there along the side or along the bottom in this case, they give you easy access to some system settings. The settings panel is very well organized and easy to go through one by one without having to deal with a whole bunch of extra settings. And it's just very, very good. It also doesn't come with a lot of extra stuff by default. So you're not going to have to deal with a ton of superfluous things that you would have on your desktop. So you have, you know, a couple icons there and you have your menu system and you could just install a distro that uses cinnamon and just get on with your day. It would just work. You don't have to deal with customizing if you don't want to. It just works right out of the box. And because it follows the windows paradigm, everyone has how to use this. So you don't have to go searching for the icons like you do in genome. You don't have to go searching for the doc or anything like that. And you don't have to deal with any of the extra settings panels and stuff like that in the settings and stuff like that that you get with Katie, which can be overly confusing for new users. So as long as you've used windows before, you know how to use this. And that is a very good thing because everyone knows how to use windows, at least the basics, I should say. So just finally, who should use cinnamon? Now there is a myth here that cinnamon is only for new users. So mint has a reputation for being a new user distro. It's the distro that a lot of people point new users towards. And that is good because it is a very new user friendly distro. But that doesn't mean that cinnamon can't be for people who have used links for a very long time. So at the end of the day, who should use cinnamon? Anybody who wants to. And that sounds like a pansy ass answer. And it kind of is. But you can't really say that cinnamon is only for new users. It's really not. And it's also not only for advanced and experienced users. If you're a new user, using this is very easy. And you can get into it very simply as customization if you want it, but you don't have to use it. You can just use your computer, learn how to use Linux, if that's what you're doing, and just carry on with your day. But if you're an experienced user, it doesn't mean that this also is not for you. You have a ton of customization here, maybe not as much as you do with KDE, but you have a lot of stuff here that you can do to make it your own. And if you are used to this workflow where there's a menu along the side and icons along the side or wherever, if you're used to that kind of workflow, this is a very good desktop environment for basically anybody to use. It's a traditional desktop environment paradigm and it just works really, really well. So that is the cinnamon desktop to answer the overall arching question, which I asked way back at the beginning. Is it good? The answer to that question is yes, it is one of the best desktop environments out there in my opinion. It's not for me simply because I don't use this paradigm. I'm a tiling window manager guy. And if I were to use a desktop environment, I'd probably go with XFCE simply because I prefer it just a little bit more. It's more old school maybe, but I just like it a little bit more. So that's my choice, but cinnamon is still very, very good. And if you are looking for a new desktop environment, you should try it out. So that is it for this video. If you have comments on the cinnamon desktop environment, you can leave those in the comment section below. I'd love to hear from you. If you like this type of video and you'd like to see more, make sure you hit that subscribe button and hit the bell icon, hashtag YouTuber. If you want to follow me on Mastodon or Odyssey, you can do so. Those links will be in the video description. You can support me on Patreon at patreon.com slash Linuxcast. If you want to support me on YouTube or LiberaPay, those links will be in the video description as well. Thanks to everybody who does support me on Patreon and YouTube, you guys are all absolutely amazing. Without you, the challenges would not be anywhere near where it is right now. So thank you so very, very much for your support. I truly, truly do appreciate it. You guys are so awesome. Thank you so very much. Thanks everybody for watching. I'll see you next time.