The developers of the Cinnarch Linux distribution have decided to move away from their nominatively definitive Cinnamon desktop. Cinnarch, which is based on Arch Linux and has thus far been packaging the desktop developed by the Linux Mint developers, is now looking to switch to the GNOME desktop environment. The developers say that the technical situation of Cinnamon makes it too hard to deploy on Arch while still staying true to the distribution's goals of distributing cutting edge software and doing so without unnecessary duplication of packages in the repositories.

The Cinnarch developers express their desire to remain faithful to the Arch way of doing things, but think that the Cinnamon packages are based on GNOME 3.6 code and earlier that is too far behind the upstream GNOME packages available in their repositories. In their announcement, the developers say that "it is almost impossible to maintain software developed by Linux Mint in a rolling release". According to them, the Cinnamon project is "1 year behind" the upstream code.

Cinnarch will now switch to using the current version of GNOME by default when the GNOME 3.8 packages arrive in the Arch extra repository. The developers say that, at that time, the Cinnamon packages will be dropped. A simple script is promised to be made available to assist people in making the transition without having to do a full reinstall.

The installer on a future release will also give users a choice of which desktop environment to install, but the developers have not yet announced what options will be available. As the name of the project is somewhat misleading under the changed circumstances, the developers are holding a poll on the Cinnarch Forum to ask their users whether the distribution should change its name.

See also:

Cinnarch: Arch Linux with Mint's Cinnamon desktop, a report from The H.

(fab)