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GNOME GUI Open Source Upgrades Linux

Cinnamon 1.6 Brings New Features and Applets 74

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.
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Cinnamon 1.6 Brings New Features and Applets

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  • by rubycodez ( 864176 ) on Wednesday September 19, 2012 @10:14AM (#41387391)

    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.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      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.

      I've known clem since the early mint days. This guy gets it. If only we had more competent people like him on the WINE project, we might see linux actually overtake windows.

      • Cinnamon is written in C and Vala and according to ohloh.net, has about 200,000 lines of code.

        Wine is written in C++, it has to be in C++ because that's what the Microsoft APIs are. C and Vala are not easy to use, but they're easier than C++. Wine is at 2.4 million lines of code, a nice round twelve times the size of Cinnamon.

        And while the Mint team is doing awesome work, they're engineering improvements on something that's already free software. The Wine team is re-implementing APIs based upon p
      • I've known clem since the early mint days. This guy gets it.

        He only gets conservatism and that's fine but don't act as if his conservative views on software GUIs are the taste of everybody.

    • by rasmusbr ( 2186518 ) on Wednesday September 19, 2012 @10:29AM (#41387555)

      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.

      Are you aware that Cinnamon is a fork of Gnome Shell, which in turn runs on top of GNOME3?

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Are you aware that Cinnamon is a fork of Gnome Shell, which in turn runs on top of GNOME3?

        GNOME's main problems are twofold : putting fucking designers in developer's seats, and putting fucking designers in control of the development process. Designers should be treated like rabid dogs, taken out only when needed, then put them back in cage and throw away the key. Anything less and they'll bring havoc to your project.

        • by grcumb ( 781340 )

          GNOME's main problems are twofold : putting fucking designers in developer's seats, and putting fucking designers in control of the development process.

          No, it's worse than that. They're not even good designers (yes, there is such a thing). I'm not a graphic designer, but I've studied the principles, and have worked professionally with them building everything from stage sets to user interfaces. It's true that engineers can't be replaced by architects and equally that developers can't be replaced by designers. But if you think for a moment that this makes architects and designers anything less than essential right from the beginning, you've got another thin

      • by MurukeshM ( 1901690 ) on Wednesday September 19, 2012 @10:52AM (#41387941)

        His problem is the GNOME3 team's UI, which is GNOME Shell. GNOME3, aside from UI changes did improve things a lot, but a total divorce from GNOME2's UI is not easily forgivable. And the dependence of GNOME Shell on GDM doesn't improve matters.

      • Sorry, my bad. Didn't see that part about GNOME3 devs dying. I concur with the points before that.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      GNOME3 and its developers can now die

      And this is marked +5 Insightful? I'd like to see if the Cinnamon developers could maintain the entire GNOME stack on their own from now on. Not to mention the disregard for human life that rubycodez seems to hold.

    • by 0100010001010011 ( 652467 ) on Wednesday September 19, 2012 @11:02AM (#41388095)

      There is also MATE [mate-desktop.org] 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.

      • but is getting fed up with "New release. Guess what we MOVED EVERYTHING AGAIN!".

        Use a LTS and don't upgrade (only update). Or use a distribution that is focussed on stability.

        • Then I'm stuck on packages that are a year old if not older.

          I've run Debian Unstable, Stable, Testing and all of them manage to upgrade to the latest packages without completely @#(*ing over my entire desktop. The visual changes between Ubuntu releases are as different as XP to Win 7 in some cases.

      • If you don't like Unity it's no skin off my back, but I got accustomed to it and found it to be fine. I also switch between my IDE, terminals, browser windows, Remmina, virt-manager, LibreOffice, etc... windows pretty quickly and without issues. I also don't remember any major user interface changes since they introduced it.

        Again, if you dislike Unity that's okay but I don't understand the rage it seems to inspire. I find it a lot more intuitive and easy to use than (non-Cinnamon) GNOME 3. I tried Mi
      • They're still working on the switching between windows feature (I'm not even kidding). The way it works now is almost bearable when you get used to it, but it still lacks text labels on the windows which makes it hard to tell different windows of the same type apart if you have more than a couple open at the same time.

        Canonical's ultimate solution is called "the spread" and is a year late, so far...

    • Yep i tried Cinnamon and it's really good, the only reasons I settled for MATE are the lack of a good working system monitor applet (may be fixed now) and the fact that i couldn't get MyGestures to work with it.

    • by Yahma ( 1004476 )

      I'll probably get modded down for this, but here goes...
      People are trying hard to hang on to their old Win95 style workflow. Nothing wrong with that; however, for me, the old workflow with the start button and horizontal panels at the top and bottom of the screen worked better on the older 4:3 monitors. With today's 16:9 flat-panel displays being ubiquitous, having panels taking up vertical real-estate doesn't seem like such a great idea.

      I personally like the way Unity and Gnome-Shell are doing things. S

      • Why not just make it so that you can put the bar on whatever side of the screen that you want?
        • Why not just make it so that you can put the bar on whatever side of the screen that you want?

          Easiness to configure/use (no "geek" needed at all, everything must just work :P)

          • Windows has the ability but I haven't heard anyone complain that a "geek" is needed to use Windows.
            • Windows has the ability but I haven't heard anyone complain that a "geek" is needed to use Windows.

              not to use daily, but to configure/fix simple things is...

        • You already could move the panels all around; they just weren't there by default. If you're not an icons-only person, several (all?) of the DEs will even rotate the taskbar text (not clocks, though, for some reason).
      • "Win95-style workflow" does not preclude having the taskbar docked to the side of your screen, as opposed to the bottom. Heck, you could do that in Win95.

    • GNOME3 and its developers can now die, they serve no purpose and the useful work has been taken up by competent people.

      Like Gnome3 was only gnome-shell. The Cinnamon project only forked a couple (well, now three with Nemo) of projects, I doubt they would have the manpower to maintain the whole of Gnome.

      • Agreed. Cinnamon is 200,000 lines of code. The whole of GNOME is around 8 million. Clem and his Mint team are doing awesome work, but they're only improving one tiny (albeit very visible) portion of the whole.
    • The GNOME3 developers try to cram their views down the user's throat

      Unlike you, the GNOME devs are very aware that Linux allows multiple GUIs. GNOME 3 implements one approach to GUIs. If you don't like it, use another GUI Xfce, Plasma Desktop or whatever

  • Demo video (Score:5, Informative)

    by rasmusbr ( 2186518 ) on Wednesday September 19, 2012 @10:22AM (#41387483)

    Here's a demo video [youtube.com] 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!

  • I'll be looking forward to the updates soon. I switched to Linux Mint once Cinnamon came out, it seemed less buggy than Mate while still giving me the use of Gnome utilities that I preferred over XFCE. Cinnamon was feature-limited at first, but Linux Mint + Cinnamon still had most of the Ubuntu goodness combined with a UI direction that made sense. Now that more features are getting added to Cinnamon with every new version, I'm glad I made the switch. My only real question is how to best move my Nautilus sc
  • I'm using LMDE, and I really like Cinnamon. However, my desktop has an AMD 64-bit processor, and there's a known bug where Cinammon randomly locks up on AMD 64, so I use XFCE.

    Can anyone tell me if this bug is fixed? I'm not about to try it, and risk losing work. I learned about this bug the hard way.

  • Just got Cinnamon 1.6 and Nemo from their PPA. I was slightly upset that Cinnamon now puts window bars in the center of the panel instead of to the left, but one thing that really irked me was Nemo. I originally had Nautilus in charge of managing my desktop, but Nemo came along and replaced it, and in the process changed the text color for desktop items from white to a dull gray. As someone who uses a dark background this is simply unacceptable, and after an hour of grepping through possible config files fo
  • This is a great project that has come a long way! I hope it gains momentum and there is cooperation amoungst projects.
  • Seriously Fedora, you need to include this as a desktop option ASAP. I put Ubuntu on one of my machines recently. You're losing me.

  • by CCarrot ( 1562079 ) on Wednesday September 19, 2012 @02:37PM (#41391305)

    Mmmmm....cinnamon applets.... ;o)

  • As so many of us, I've been unsatisfied with recent developments in linux desktop environments. Since the advent of compositing, I've moved away from minimalist window managers, to enjoy window scaling/expo and similar improvements in desktop usability. I consider myself open to progress, in the sense that I've tried both unity and the gnome shell. But these last two have never gotten "out of my way", as they proclaim to do, and attempts to configure things to work the way I want have never been completely

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