[Discuss] Cinnamon

[tmetro+blu at gmail.com (Tom Metro)]

F. Ozbek wrote:
> There is no default desktop concept on Linux Mint.
> You can use Mate, Cinnamon, KDE or Xfce.

I see. And the project doesn't recommend one?


> I have tested Cinnamon on Linux Mint 13, decided that
> it is not stable enough for my taste and switched to
> Linux Mint 13 Mate and it is rock solid so far.(6 weeks.)

What sort of stability problems?

I installed Cinnamon on top of Ubuntu 12.04 in October and initially had
some crashes of Cinnamon, as well as several from gone-screensaver,
which seemed to be due to an interaction with the desktop.

I've been pulling updates from the Cinnamon PPA, and the problems seemed
to resolve within about a month.

There were still some minor bugs: I had observed a bug with the
notification applet incrementing the notification count for time-limited
notifications, and then not decrementing the count when those
notifications expire. That appears to have been fixed recently.

And the pop-up informational text from the applets (the line describing
what it does that appears when you mouse over) is fixed to use black,
which can't be read on a dark background. (There's a bug filed for this.
CSS problems in the theming code.)

There are some other issues with the applets not working as expected,
but I haven't really bothered to test them out again since I initially
set up the desktop. They're largely informational eyecandy, so I haven't
been motivated to revisit, but I should.

The two things I miss most from GNOME 2 are the ability to integrate a
good task switcher, like DockbarX, into the main panel (I normally use
only one panel at the top of my primary monitor; as a work-around I've
been running DocbarX as a free-standing panel), and a better workspace
switcher.

The workspace switcher supplied for Cinnamon just shows a matrix of
plain boxes with numbers in them representing the workspace number - no
visual preview/thumbnail, and it uses a background color that makes it
blend in to the panel too well. I'd like to be able to try out
persistently named workspaces, which are available in some other modern
desktops.

Generally I find Cinnamon to be stable and usable, but as I previously
said, unfinished. Good enough for now, but I probably wouldn't recommend
it for those not willing to put up with a few bugs. The assumption is
that it'll get better, and head in a direction more favorable than GNOME 3.

 -Tom

-- 
Tom Metro
Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
"Enterprise solutions through open source."
Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/