Cinnamon a GNOME 2.x style desktop

This afternoon while searching for more information about this ACTA mess i came to a site featuring Linux Mint's new desktop interface codename 'Cinnamon', a Gnome 2 looking desktop built on top of Gnome 3.

Is this a step backwards? Cinnamon interface looks and works a lot like the popular Gnome 2.x interface, but it’s built on top of the Gnome 3.x interface. 

How is that going to work? Time to ask mighty Google for enlightenment, the first images weren't that impressing but being a geek i couldn't say no to try a new window manager so i installed it on my Ubuntu 11.10 using this instructions.

After a couple of commands on the terminal and a few minutes i was ready to go, the first thing you notice is the clean desktop featuring only the bar on the bottom as you see in the picture.

Standard Cinnamon desktop.

Not impressed? well, neither was i to be honest, but as i started to poke around i quickly realized that it's actually pretty nice, fast, and well organised, the menu window is big and is neatly arranged, on the far left you have your favorite applications, in the middle the different software categories and by hovering the mouse over any of those categories you have on the far right the applications corresponding to that category.

Menu window

AND here's this particular thing that i love on G3: when you move the cursor to the top left corner you have an overview of all the open windows :-)

Overview of all open windows

This combination of old school G2 interface on top of the actual G3 is well made, practical, productive and very nice to work with. Clement Lefebvre, lead developer of Linux Mint and his team created Cinnamon because many people, including Linux’s father Linus Torvalds don't like the new Gnome 3.x interface.

Among the new features that the now official stable Cinnamon 1.2 includes are desktop effects, desktop layouts, a new configuration tool, and applets as well as a variety of bug fixes and other improvements.

Overall, many of the changes aim to reintroduce a level of customisability that numerous desktops have lost in recent years, Lefebvre said.

Cinnamon is available as a download for the mayor Linux distributions on their website.

Gnome Tweak Tool

GNOME 3 or as i like to call it 'G3' is the newest release of the Gnome desktop. Many Linux users and distributions are starting to adopt G3 as their default desktop environment because of its look and feel, user-friendliness and performance. But when it comes to customizing, there aren't many options available by default in G3.  If you want to do more serious customization on your G3 desktop then you need the Gnome tweak tool.

The Gnome tweak tool is an open source tool developed to customize your G3 beyond normal settings. With this great tool you can make advanced adjustments to various G3 settings including fonts used in the user interface, user interface themes, changes in window management behavior and much more.

Interested? then let's proceed to install Gnome tweak tool in Ubuntu using G3. 

Gnome tweak tool is on the Ubuntu repositories, meaning that installing is as simple as opening software center and typing 'gnome tweak tool' on the search box, clicking install and watch the progress bar :-)

Once you're through with the install, you can start tweaking the settings of G3. Gnome tweak tool has a very simple and intuitive interface, on the left panel you have six different categories (Desktop, Fonts, Shell, Shell Extensions, Theme and Windows) that can be 'tweaked' using the corresponding options on the right panel.

Let's click on the 'Desktop' category on the left panel, on the right panel you can choose from the different tweaking options for the desktop, an image says more than a thousand words so take a look at the following screenshots.

Now click Fonts, here you can configure the Text scaling factor, Default font, Document font, Monospace font, Window title font, Hinting and Antialising.

Under Shell category, you can configure date, time, calendar and arrangements of buttons on the titlebar.

The theme category takes care of the setting for menus and buttons as well as themes for cursor, key binding, icons, Gtk+, shell and window.

The Windows category, here you can configure the settings for  various click actions on the title bar of windows and the window focus mode as well.

Happy customizing!!!!