How to Install Latest Cinnamon Desktop in Ubuntu and Fedora

In this tutorial, we shall walk through the various steps that you can follow to install the latest stable version of Cinnamon desktop on Ubuntu 17.04, 16.10 & Ubuntu 16.04 and Fedora 22-25. Before we move any further, let us talk about a few properties of Cinnamon desktop as outlined below.

Cinnamon desktop is an intuitive and elegant desktop environment which was initially developed as a fork of the popular GNOME graphical shell, and it is based on GTK+3 toolkit. It is the default desktop environment on Linux Mint Cinnamon edition.

Suggested Read: 8 Best and Most Popular Linux Desktop Environments of All Time

For starters, to get a comprehensive understanding of Linux Mint projects, the Cinnamon project combines numerous smaller projects such as Cinnamon, a fork of GNOME shell, Cinnamon screensaver, Cinnamon desktop, Cinnamon Menus, Cinnamon Settings Daemon and many more.

However, some of the notable components integrated into the Cinnamon desktop comprise of the following:

1. MDM display manager,a fork of GDM
2. Nemo file manager, a fork of Nautilus
3. Muffin window manager, a fork of Mutter
4. Cinnamon session manager
5. Cinnamon translations, which contains translations used in Cinnamon
6. Blueberry, a bluetooth configuration tool and many more

Importantly, the latest stable release of Cinnamon desktop is Cinnamon 3.4, which has shipped in with the following improvements and new features:

1. Desktop grid
2. Multi-process enhancements
3. Support for Wildcard in file search
4. Additional Screensaver config options
5. Better configuration of mice acceleration and sensitivity
6. Support for LightDM in System Settings

For a detailed information about the Cinnamon 3.4 change-log see this Git commit.

Install Cinnamon 3.4 on Ubuntu 17.04, 16.10 & 16.04

We should note that Cinnamon 3.4 is not available to install on Ubuntu officially as of now, however, if you are running Ubuntu 17.04, 16.10 & 16.04 you can install it using third party embrosyn’s PPA as shown.

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:embrosyn/cinnamon
$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt-get install cinnamon

After installation is complete, logout of the current session or possibly restart your system. At the login interface, select Cinnamon as the desktop environment to use and login.

Install Cinnamon 3.4 on Fedora 22-25

It’s pretty straight forward to install Cinnamon Desktop on Fedora workstation using dnf command as shown.

# dnf install @cinnamon-desktop

After installation finishes, logout from the current session and select Cinnamon as the desktop environment to use and login.

Suggested Read: How to Install Mate Desktop in Ubuntu 16.04 and Fedora 22-24 Workstations

If you didn’t liked the Cinnamon Desktop, you can remove it completely from your respective Linux distributions using following instructions.

---------------- On Ubuntu 17.04/16.04/16.10 ---------------- 
$ sudo add-apt-repository --remove ppa:embrosyn/cinnamon
$ sudo apt-get remove cinnamon 
$ sudo apt-get autoremove
---------------- On Fedora 22-25 Workstation ---------------- 
# dnf remove @cinnamon-desktop

That’s it, and I believe these are simple and easy steps to follow. In case things did not work out well for you, let us know via the feedback section below. You can as well share with us your computing experience after using Cinnamon desktop environment, importantly, suggest it to new Linux users plus many more.