On Mon, Oct 14, 2013 at 01:21:02PM +1300, Peter Reutemann wrote:
"Prior to version 2.0, and similar to Shell or Unity, Cinnamon was a frontend on top of the GNOME desktop. In version 2.0, and similar to MATE or Xfce, Cinnamon is an entire desktop environment built on GNOME technologies.
As I have abandoned using either of the two main Linux desktops I thought I would give this new cinnamon a go. Only has version 1.7 in Debian sid so had to build it from source myself. First problem is that the cinnamon announcement points only to the window manager repository and none of the announcement, the docs in the repo, or the cinnamon website gives any clue of the build process or that cinnamon is split between a number of repositories, or of the dependencies between said repositories. Fortunately all components have a debian directory with debian control and build files so it was not too difficult to work out build dependencies and get the required components needed for building installed (just a pain in the butt that I needed to work through this). Compiled it for my favourite architecture (alpha) and got it installed. Part of the reason for trying this version of cinnamon is that the gnome-settings-daemon segfaults on alpha, and I was hoping that maybe the new cinnamon-settings-daemon might be better. Vain hope---that also crashes on my alpha. My fear that they have just used the gnome-settings-daemon code has been realised. But at least the cinnamon desktop eventually came up and was useable although none of the user settings programs worked. Contrast this to Gnome, which on the gnome-settings-daemon crash just displays a "Something's gone wrong" message with no information as to what actually went wrong (and the logs are not much help) and then returns one to the login prompt. Cinnamon 2.0 has brought into the 3D graphics look (which appears to me to be marketing hype for transparency) of which I am not a fan. I find the newer Mac OS X and Microsoft desktops rather confusing as the shining through of lower windows, etc., obscures window boundaries, etc. But fortunately the Cinnamon transparency is only slight, and underlying objects barely show through the upper layers, so I possibly could work with it. But a very pleasant surprise. I fortuitously hit the Windows-leftArrow key combination and suddenly the active window was resized and tiled to the left side of the screen. I discovered with a little more experimentation that one can tile windows to cover the left, right, top or bottom half of the screen, or even the top-left, top-right, bottom-left or bottom-right of the screen. Utter brilliance! Whoever thought of this feature deserves a chocolate fish or three. It would be nice to improve this for tiling to three columns, particularly for users with large screens. (I often work with windows arranged in three columns.) Maybe there is a config option for this but I could not check due to the failure of the settings-deamon to run. I have not had time to explore cinnamon more than that. At this stage it appears to me to be a desktop that is worth exploring more to see if it is really up to scratch to be the desktop of choice for the serious Unix/Linux user. Cheers Michael.