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 17.10-16.04 and Fedora 25-27. 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:
- MDM display manager,a fork of GDM
- Nemo file manager, a fork of Nautilus
- Muffin window manager, a fork of Mutter
- Cinnamon session manager
- Cinnamon translations, which contains translations used in Cinnamon
- Blueberry, a bluetooth configuration tool and many more
Importantly, the latest stable release of Cinnamon desktop is Cinnamon 3.6, which has shipped in with the following improvements and new features:
- Refined user interface for the configuration page of Cinnamon spices (applets, desklets, extensions, themes).
- Supports GNOME Online Accounts.
- Progress bar in taskbar.
- Special change in the on-screen keyboard app.
- Nemo-preview has support for animated GIFs.
- The network applet now has the ability to re-scan for wireless networks and so much more.
Install Cinnamon 3.6 Desktop on Ubuntu
We should note that Cinnamon 3.6 is not available to install on Ubuntu officially as of now, however, if you are running Ubuntu 17.10, 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 3.6 on Fedora 25-27
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
How to Remove Cinnamon 3.6 on Ubuntu & Fedora
If you do not want the Cinnamon Desktop, you can remove it completely from your respective Linux distributions using following instructions.
---------------- On Ubuntu ---------------- $ sudo add-apt-repository --remove ppa:embrosyn/cinnamon $ sudo apt-get remove cinnamon $ sudo apt-get autoremove ---------------- On Fedora 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.
I’ve tried but didnt get the same titlebar, colors and minimize, close etc buttons’ shape as these screenshots do. What did you choose or what did you install after installing cinnamon?
@JohnDoe,
If you want similar look and feel of Cinnamon Desktop, you need to install Paper Theme on Ubuntu using following commands.
Is this applicable for ubuntu 14.04 LTS
@vinoth
The PPA only works for Ubuntu 16.04/15.10, therefore, this guide is not applicable for Ubuntu 14.04.