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Linux Mint—Cinnamon

Linux Mint has just released its latest version, and it comes with a new desktop environment called "Cinnamon." It's based on GNOME 3, but it's most definitely not GNOME 3. To me this is fantastic news even if I never use it (I'm sure I'll try it) and even if I do try it and don't like it.

GNOME 3 is just such a bad user interface that anything other than it is good news. There is such a proliferation of full development environments going on now that KDE and GNOME being the only two choices is gone forever. Unity has become an interesting design (although I can't imagine using something with that few options), but it has severe stability problems every time I use it. It can't take two minutes to log back into a computer that's not even suspended. It just can't; but the Unity in Ubuntu 11.10 was a huge improvement, so maybe it will be usable in the next round.

And then there's XFCE. Unfortunately it is impossible to get statistics for things like this, but I really do believe XFCE is experiencing a surge right now. I use it, and I love it. It has problems, and it doesn't do a lot of the things that you expect when used on a laptop, but it seems a lot of GNOME 2 people switched right over to XFCE.

Now, I think Cinnamon will be relevant. That's kind of a no-brainer if Mint maintains its number one spot on DistroWatch.com, but I think it's going to be more important that. For one thing, it can be installed on other distros, which gives it a practical advantage over Unity. For another, it's the first thing I've seen that's actually based on GNOME 3. It's basically the thing that Linux users were expecting when they heard about GNOME 3 in the first place. Although I haven't used it, Cinnamon seems to have the right balance of a traditional behavior mixed with new features. I'm not sure if it has customizable enough to be fun, but it's certainly an improvement over GNOME 3. It's not that I really think Cinnamon will take over, but I do think it will really affect the future of this debate.

What's more relevant to me here is that the writing is now officially on the wall for GNOME 3. I still think it was the main reason for Ubuntu to create Unity, and Mint is very open that GNOME 3's inadequacies were the reason it developed Cinnamon. People are just not having GNOME 3 as an acceptable future for the Linux desktop, and that's great news to me.

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