Cinnamon fork of GNOME Shell gets stable release

h-online.com ^ | 24 Jan 2012 | djwm

[smokingfrog]

Version 1.2 of Cinnamon, the Linux Mint project's fork of the GNOME Shell, has been released and the APIs and desktop interface have been declared fully stable by Mint Founder Clement Lefebvre. Created last year to streamline the Mint developers' changes to the GNOME 3 environment, the Cinnamon fork brings familiar GNOME 2 design elements to the GNOME 3 shell. Among the enhancements in the stable version is easier customisation through a "Cinnamon Settings" tool which includes, for example, the ability to set the date format for the calendar applet and change panel launchers' icons.

The Settings tool is also the route to configuring Cinnamon applets, newly added in 1.2, which currently add support to the desktop for Accessibility, Recent Documents, Removable Drives, Trash and XRandR monitor control. Applets are an enhanced form of extension compared to GNOME 3 desktop extensions – Lefebvre says the developers' plan is that all panel components should be applets and dissuades other developers from writing extensions for anything but "advanced purposes".

The desktop now comes with a selection of three desktop layouts. The Traditional layout offers a single bar at the bottom of the screen with main menu, launcher, taskbar and system tray with applets, while the Flipped layout places that bar at the top of the screen. A Classic layout uses a top bar with main menu, launcher and system tray and a lower bar with task bar in a style more akin to GNOME 2. The main menu itself has been improved, so that, while searching, pressing enter launches the first item in the results, and it is now harder to accidentally make your results disappear by moving the mouse over the categories.

[2 Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten]

At least end-users could benefit by both the new Linux 4.0 kernel

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Wow that’s a pretty advanced kernel there ....

[cothrige]

If after all these years, Ubuntu still required tweaking, command line inputs, and mucking about, screw it. Not interested. Don’t bother posting “simple” commands to tell me how to do it either. I don’t care. That is retarded.

Man, I feel your pain. I once decided to use a computer that had Windows on it, and discovered how impossibly geeky it was. I told it to start and do what I want, but I found it doesn't even speak English. Can you imagine? And then I was told, and this is hard to believe, that I had to point this "mouse" thingy at the icon to start an application. Good Lord, can you get any more complicated and intentionally difficult? And, of course, that didn't work either. When I picked up the mouse and aimed it at the icon on the screen nothing happened. And clicking it against the screen just demonstrated how flimsy the whole contraption is because it cracked the monitor. So ridiculous. And, like you, I am totally uninterested in suggestions about how to correct this utter lack of intelligent design on the part of computer manufacturers. As of now I am going back to banging two rocks together.

[Big Giant Head]

Do I detect sarcasm? You may have missed my point. PCLinuxOS worked perfectly, and I’ve YET to mess with an Ubuntu that installs so well.

I’m NOT interested in tweaks, massive user configuration, shells, etc. My goal with a computer is to turn it on and use it, not configure it. That is my whole beef with Ubuntu is that it has never done exactly that. User-friendly is not ever having to open a command line. If I WANTED, or had a DESIRE, to use the command line, I would have read more on it, but that’s not why I have a computer on my desk. I’m not a programmer, I’m a user. That is why PCLinuxOS was so superior. Install, use. Period.