Cinnamon (desktop environment)

The development of Cinnamon began by the Linux Mint team following the April 2011 release of GNOME 3, in which the conventional desktop metaphor of GNOME 2 was replaced in favor of GNOME Shell. Following several attempts to extend GNOME 3 so that it would suit the Linux Mint design goals through "Mint GNOME Shell Extensions", the Linux Mint team eventually forked several components of GNOME 3 to build an independent desktop environment. This separation from GNOME was completed with the release of Cinnamon 2.0.0 on 9 October 2013. Applets, extensions, actions, and desklets made explicitly for Cinnamon are no longer compatible with GNOME Shell.

As the most common desktop environment for Linux Mint, Cinnamon has generally received favorable coverage by the press, in particular for its ease of use and gentle learning curve. In regard to its conservative design model, Cinnamon is similar to the Xfce, MATE, GNOME 2, and GNOME Flashback desktop environments.

History

As with many other desktop environments based on GNOME, including Canonical's Unity, Cinnamon was the result of disapproval and dissatisfaction of the GNOME team's abandonment of a traditional desktop experience in April 2011. Until then, GNOME 2 had included the traditional desktop metaphor, but in GNOME 3, this was entirely replaced with GNOME Shell, which by default lacked a taskbar-like panel and other features of a conventional desktop like those of Microsoft Windows and GNOME 2. The elimination of these basic features was unacceptable to the developers of distributions such as Mint and Ubuntu, which are geared to users who wanted interfaces that are familiar and easy to use.

To overcome these differences, the Linux Mint team initially set out to develop extensions for GNOME Shell to replace the abandoned features. The results of this effort were known as the "Mint GNOME Shell Extensions" or MGSE. Meanwhile, the MATE desktop environment had also been forked from GNOME 2. Linux Mint 12, released in November 2011, subsequently included both, thereby giving users a choice of either GNOME 3 with the MGSE or a MATE desktop that closely resembled GNOME 2.

However, even with MGSE, GNOME 3 was still largely missing the comforts of GNOME 2 and was not well received by the user community. At the time, some of the missing features could not be replaced by extensions, and it seemed that extensions would not be viable in the long run due to concerns of significant changes upstream from the GNOME team. Moreover, the GNOME developers were not willing to cooperate with the wishes of the Mint developers. To give the Mint developers finer control over the development process, GNOME Shell was forked as "Project Cinnamon" in January 2012.

Gradually, the Mint developers adapted various core applications. Beginning with version 1.2, released in January 2012, the window manager of Cinnamon is called Muffin, which was originally a fork of GNOME 3's Mutter. Similarly, since September 2012 (version 1.6 onwards), Cinnamon includes the Nemo file manager which was forked from Nautilus. Nemo was created in response to disapproval of some upstream changes in Nautilus 3.6 that significantly altered the functionality and user interface of the file manager. Cinnamon-Settings, included since May 2013 (version 1.8 onwards), combines the functionality of GNOME-Control-Center with that of Cinnamon-Settings, and made it possible to manage and update applets, extensions, desklets, actions, and themes through Cinnamon-Settings. Gnome-Screensaver was also forked into what is now called Cinnamon-Screensaver.

Since 9 October 2013 (version 2.0.0 onwards), Cinnamon is no longer a frontend of GNOME like Unity or GNOME Shell, but rather a completely independent desktop environment. Although Cinnamon is still heavily built on GNOME technologies and utilizes GTK, it no longer requires GNOME as a dependency in order to be installed.

Further improvements in later versions include a desktop grid, wildcard support in file searches, multi-process settings daemon, desktop actions in the panel launcher, separate processes for desktop handling and file manager in Nemo; an additional desktop panel layout option that offers a more modern looking theme and grouped windows; improved naming for duplicate applications in the menu (i.e. Flatpak vs. deb packages), pinned files in Nemo, touchpad gestures, bulk file rename of multiple files and folders using bulky, customizable context menu items in Nemo called "Actions", the ability to display user profile pictures on the panel, improved multi-monitor support in regard to open windows, better visual indicators in the system notifications tray for VPN connections, and an emphasis on performance improvements.

On 30 November 2023, version 6.0.0 of the Cinnamon desktop was released. This is the first release of Cinnamon to include an experimental Wayland session implementation, along with fractional scaling and AVIF background image support, among other improvements. On 16 June 2024, version 6.2.0 of Cinnamon was released. This release introduced the ability to add the user profile picture to the panel, along with other improvements. On 28 November 2024, version 6.4.0 of Cinnamon was released. This release introduced redesigned dialog prompts using the Clutter toolkit rather than GTK. In addition, A "Night Light" blue light filter was introduced to potentially reduce eye strain and improve sleep quality when an end user is using Cinnamon during night time. On 10 December 2025, version 6.6.0 of Cinnamon was released. This release uses easing-based effects, transitioning away from Tweener animations. Additionally, the release improves keyboard handling and allows users to enable suspend mode in the Power module for battery-intensive tasks, among other improvements.

December 2026 is expected to see the release of the first version of Cinnamon that fully supports not only X11 but also Wayland.