Ceci est une ancienne révision du document !
The last Full Circle review of Ubuntu Cinnamon was written about version 22.04 LTS by Erik and appeared in Full Circle issue 188. Since then, three more releases have come out, and I thought this would be a good time to have another look at this distribution, especially since it was just given official Ubuntu flavor status in early 2023.
Background
Ubuntu Cinnamon has an interesting history. Like quite a number of Linux desktops, the Cinnamon desktop traces its origins back to the GNOME 2 desktop and the initial wide dissatisfaction with its replacement, GNOME 3.
GNOME 2 first came out on 16 June, 2002 and quickly proved very popular among Linux users. It was a simple, three-menu desktop (Applications, Places and System) and was widely used across many distributions. It was the first Ubuntu desktop when Ubuntu first appeared in the fall of 2004, as Ubuntu 4.10. As a simple, menu-driven desktop, GNOME 2 was an easy transition for defecting Windows users and made them feel at home fast.
GNOME 2 was so popular that its developers decided to do away with it and create GNOME 3, as a replacement, with the first official stable release in April, 2011. GNOME 3 was a totally different concept including a Mac-like launcher and no “maximize” buttons on application windows. Early versions of GNOME 3 were not great to use and, while a few users actually liked it, many hated it, including many developers. Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel, publicly called GNOME 3 a “total user experience design failure” and added, “I want my sane interfaces back. I have yet to meet anybody who likes the unholy mess that is gnome-3.” He personally stopped using GNOME and switched to Xfce.
The developer response to GNOME 3 was swift – they got to work across the Linux ecosystem with some better ideas.
Even before GNOME 3 was officially released, based on seeing early beta builds, the Ubuntu developers created a new interface called Unity which was first out on 9 June, 2010, ten months ahead of GNOME 3’s final official release. Unity is still around today and used as the default desktop on Ubuntu Unity. The mainstream Ubuntu distribution actually moved away from Unity to a modified version of GNOME 3 on 19 October, 2017 with the release of Ubuntu 17.10. This modified GNOME 3 was again an attempt to address its shortcomings without the costs of developing Unity.
In another parallel project, on 19 August, 2011, only four months after GNOME 3 came out, a fork of GNOME 2 became the MATE desktop, to be used in Ubuntu MATE starting in October, 2014.
Over at Linux Mint, where they had also been using GNOME 2 as their desktop, the developers tried a series of patches and extensions to tame GNOME 3, called the Mint GNOME Shell Extensions. These were not a great solution, though, and in January, 2012, Mint developer Gwendal Lebihan started Project Cinnamon to produce, not a GNOME 2 fork, but a new replacement menu-driven desktop for GNOME applications. Mint did fork GNOME’s window manager, Mutter, to become Muffin, and the GNOME file manager, Nautilus, to become Nemo, which brought back many deleted features from Nautilus. The Cinnamon desktop became fully independent from GNOME with version 2.0 in October, 2013 and it remains Mint’s main desktop today, offered alongside MATE and Xfce.
Not long after the Mint developers created the Cinnamon desktop, there was interest in using it to build a dedicated Ubuntu variant. In 2012, Eric Kranich did just that and called this Ubuntu with Cinnamon “Cubuntu” with the first release 12.04. Cubuntu was controversial because it featured proprietary software including Google Chrome and Skype and also because, on initial installation, it was in French only, although that could be changed after installation. It also included a number of other desktops in the download file, selectable at boot-up. The last version was Cubuntu 16.04.3, out on 7 August, 2017, after which the project ended.
Joshua Peisach started a new Cinnamon effort in 2019, initially calling it Ubuntu Cinnamon Remix, with the first release 19.10, out on 4 December, 2019. The name was soon simplified to just Ubuntu Cinnamon. After seven releases had demonstrated that it had staying power, a team behind it and a solid user base, it became an official Ubuntu flavor on 28 March, 2023.
In this review we are looking at Ubuntu Cinnamon 23.10, which came out on 12 October, 2023. This is the ninth overall release and its second as an official flavor. As an interim release, 23.10 is supported for nine months, until July, 2024. The next release will be a long term support version, Ubuntu Cinnamon 24.04 LTS, due on 25 April, 2024.
Installation
I downloaded the 4.1 GB ISO file for Ubuntu Cinnamon 23.10 from the official source by HTTP. I had tried to get it using BitTorrent but, almost four weeks after the official release date, there was no one left seeding the torrents. I did a command line SHA256 sum check on the file to confirm a good download.
I ran Ubuntu Cinnamon 23.10 from a USB stick equipped with Ventoy 1.0.96. Ubuntu Cinnamon is not specifically listed as having been tested on Ventoy, but it worked fine.
System requirements
Ubuntu Cinnamon does not list any minimum system requirements that I could locate but it is probably safe to assume that it is similar to mainstream Ubuntu which requires at least a 64-bit, 2 GHz dual-core processor and 4 GB of RAM. A faster processor and 8 GB of RAM would be better.
Trying out Ubuntu Cinnamon
On boot-up, Ubuntu Cinnamon 23.10 presents a very clean and simple desktop with a cinnamon-colored wallpaper, naturally. Being a mostly GNOME application-equipped desktop, the key to what makes Ubuntu Cinnamon unique is its menu and settings.
The Cinnamon menu is activated from a button on the bottom-left of the panel or with the “super” (Windows) key. The menu has a row of quick links down its left side, with icons for such things as Firefox, System Settings, Pidgin, GNOME Terminal, GNOME Files, screen locking, and shutdown. The main part of the menu on the right gives access by category: all applications, accessories, games, graphics, internet, office, sound and video, administration, preferences, places, and recent files. You can also search for applications by name or function. As is the case with Xubuntu, the menu can be resized by drawing it out with the mouse pointer, which is a very useful feature.
The section of the menu marked “preferences” gives access to the individual simple settings boxes that are also unique to Ubuntu Cinnamon. These can be accessed from the main menu individually or the System Settings box, which gathers them all together as a collection of tiles. Having each short list of settings as a single box is an interesting idea. It does make it pretty easy for users to find things, plus it makes the settings modular for the developers, which should be easier to maintain and to add new boxes.
While very much a menu-driven desktop, Cinnamon is nothing like GNOME 2’s old three-menu solution. In fact, in many ways Cinnamon is better, very simple, easy to use, and will present no learning curve at all for transitioning Windows users. Plus it actually does make up for GNOME 3’s deficiencies, even in Ubuntu’s current, modified GNOME 3 desktop.
The panel is a Cinnamon feature, too. Fixed at the bottom of the screen, it is otherwise quite customizable including a wide range of height and icon sizes, plus it can be set to display all the time, hide unless the mouse pointer touches the bottom of the screen, or “smart hide” when a window touches it. Simple and effective.
All windows come with three control buttons, fixing another GNOME 3 issue.
New
As a singular release, Ubuntu Cinnamon 23.10 does not bring a lot that is new over the last version, 23.04; just a few tweaks.
New in this release is Cinnamon 5.8.4 replacing version 5.6.7 used in the last release. This new version of the desktop supports mouse gestures using KDE's touchegg package, and also has some changes to the themes module allowing the creation of simplified themes.
One other small change is to the Plymouth Theme splash screen displayed text which now says “Ubuntu Cinnamon” instead of “ubuntucinnamon” plus the bottom of the text is not truncated.
Like the other Ubuntu 23.10 flavors, Ubuntu Cinnamon has Linux kernel version 6.5 with its new hardware support plus the usual collection of updated applications from the Ubuntu repositories.
Settings
One way that Ubuntu Cinnamon differentiates itself from mainstream Ubuntu 23.10 is that it has a lot of user customization options. The range runs to three different mouse pointer themes, 35 window color themes, 32 icon themes, 29 desktop themes (which set the panel colors), and 37 wallpapers, which are organized into 22 categories! That wide range of choices puts it in the same class as Kubuntu and Ubuntu Unity. Lots of user choices usually translate to increased user dedication to a distribution.
The 23.10 default wallpaper includes the Ubuntu Minotaur and labyrinth motif rendered in the trademark dark brown cinnamon color. The rest of the wallpapers provided form an eclectic collection from a number of sources, including photo wallpapers from Ubuntu and even some from Debian with the Debian curl logo on them. The claim to Debian heritage is not totally out of line since Ubuntu Cinnamon derives from Ubuntu, which is itself a Debian derivative, so it is Debian’s grandchild.
Applications
Some of the applications included with Ubuntu Cinnamon 23.10 are: Alacritty 0.12.2 terminal emulator Archive Manager (File Roller) 43.0 archiver* Brasero 3.12.3 CD/DVD burner* Cheese 44.1 webcam Cinnamon 5.8.4 desktop environment CUPS 2.4.6 printing system Document Scanner (Simple Scan) 44.0 optical scanner* Document Viewer 45.0 (Evince) PDF viewer Firefox 118.0.1 web browser Celluloid 0.25 video player GDebi 44.2 package installer GIMP 2.10.34 image editor* GNOME Calendar 45.0 desktop calendar GNOME Disks 45.0 disk manager GNOME Photos 44.0 photo manager* GNOME Software 45.0 package management system GNOME System Monitor 45.0.2 system resource monitor GNOME Terminal 3.49.92 terminal emulator GNOME Videos 43.0 (totem) video player* GNote 44.1 note taking application Gparted 1.5.0 partition editor gThumb 3.12.2 image viewer* Hexchat 2.16.1 IRC client* Image Magick 6.9.11.60 command line image editor* Image Viewer 45.0 (Eye of Gnome) image viewer LibreOffice 7.6.2 office suite Muffin 5.8.1 window manager Nemo 5.8.4 file manager Pidgin 2.14.12 IRC client* Pipewire 0.3.79 audio controller Remmina 1.4.31 remote desktop client Rhythmbox 3.4.7 music player Sound Juicer 3.40.0 CD ripper Synaptic 0.91.3 package manager Text Editor (gedit) 44.2 text editor* Thunderbird 115.3.1 email client Transmission 4.0.2 bittorrent client * indicates same application version as used in Ubuntu Cinnamon 23.04 supplied as a snap, so version depends on the upstream package manager
That list of default applications is quite long and includes just about anything a desktop user could want, except perhaps a video editor. There are some oddities on the list, though, like the Sound Juicer CD ripper and Brasero CD/DVD burner, which seem a bit archaic. There are also a lot of applications that duplicate other applications, like two terminal emulators, two image viewers, two image editors, two software package managers, and two video players. There are also 19 games included. If I was installing Ubuntu Cinnamon for daily use, I would probably have a long list of things to remove to make it lighter and its menus shorter. A good concept might be the creation of an Ubuntu Cinnamon “minimal installation” version with just the base desktop, like Ubuntu and Xubuntu offer, to save ISO file download size and user time in cleaning up after installation.
Most of the default applications included are from the GNOME desktop or at least are common applications often found alongside GNOME, such as the Firefox web browser, Thunderbird email, and the Remmina remote desktop client.
Ubuntu Cinnamon uses the Cinnamon desktop's own Nemo file manager in place of the standard Gnome file manager, Nautilus. Nemo is actually an earlier fork of Nautilus with some of Nautilus' deleted features reinstated like the “up one level” button. It does not, however, have bulk file-renaming yet, so most users will need to add a bulk file-renamer, such as GPRename.
Conclusions
From my first time using it, I am pleased to report that Ubuntu Cinnamon is surprisingly good. It provides a very simple and elegant desktop that will be an easy transition for almost any user new to it, regardless of your last operating system.
I saw almost no drawbacks to Ubuntu Cinnamon 23.10 except, perhaps, its very long list of default applications with many functional duplications which may require some user paring down after installation, to reduce menu clutter.
The next release will be Ubuntu Cinnamon 24.04 LTS, a long term support version with three years of updates, out on 25 April, 2024.
External links
Official website: https://ubuntucinnamon.org/