Cinnamon 3.0 was released yesterday and it includes improved GTK+ 3.20 support, new accessibility and sound settings and more.





Cinnamon is a GTK3 desktop environment, initially started as a fork of GNOME Shell, which is used by default in Linux Mint Cinnamon edition. Among its features are:

panel with a menu, launchers, window list, system tray;

support for panel applets and desktop widgets (Desklets);

supports desktop animations and transition effects;

highly configurable: users can customize the panel (besides applets, the panel supports autohide and the panel layout can be changed: you can use one panel or two panels like the old GNOME 2 layout), easily change themes, customize desktop animations, hot corners, etc.;

much more.

window management improvements on tiling, mapping and unmapping windows, compositor’s window groups and tracking of full screen windows

improved out of the box touchpad support (edge-scrolling and two-finger-scrolling can now be configured independently and are both enabled by default)

new accessibility and sound settings (both rewritten as native cinnamon-settings modules)

battery powered devices can be renamed

different favorite applications can now be set for plain-text, documents and source code files

panel launchers now include application actions

animation effects are now enabled by default on dialogs and menus

favorites and system options can now be disabled in the menu applet

the photo-frame desklet now also scans subdirectories

improved support for GTK 3.20, Spotify 0.27, Viber

And the Preferred Applications dialog which now allows settings different applications for opening documents, plain text, and source code files:





Cinnamon 3.0 will be included with Linux Mint 18 Cinnamon edition. It's not yet clear if it will be available for Linux Mint 17.3, but I assume that's pretty difficult to achieve, considering that Linux Mint 17.3 is based on Ubuntu 14.04 which uses a pretty old GTK+ version (3.10).



Update: Clem mentioned in a versions 3.0, 3.2, 3.4 and 3.6 are targeting Mint 18.x.", so Linux Mint 17.x users won't be getting Cinnamon 3.x. . It's not yet clear if it will be available for Linux Mint 17.3, but I assume that's pretty difficult to achieve, considering that Linux Mint 17.3 is based on Ubuntu 14.04 which uses a pretty old GTK+ version (3.10).Clem mentioned in a comment that ".", so Linux Mint 17.x users won't be getting Cinnamon 3.x.





Note that in the screenshots above, I'm using the new Linux Mint Mint Y GTK and icon themes as well as the Linux Mint Cinnamon theme. You'll find download links for these below, under "Cinnamon 3.0 tweaks for Ubuntu".

Install Cinnamon 3.0 in Ubuntu 16.04 or 15.10 via PPA

Sunderland93's Cinnamon PPA (Ubuntu 16.04 only - it's still in the process of being updated at the time I'm writing this article)

embrosyn's Cinnamon PPA (for Ubuntu 16.04 and 15.10)

There's also the Cinnamon Nightly Builds PPA , but it's not recommended for regular users because it contains untested / unstable code from Git!





For the instructions below I'm using embrosyn's Cinnamon stable PPA.





To add the PPA and install Cinnamon 3.0 in Ubuntu 16.04 or 15.10, use the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:embrosyn/cinnamon sudo apt update sudo apt install cinnamon blueberry

Tweaks

1. Themes



In Ubuntu 16.04, Ambiance and Radiance themes have some issues in Cinnamon, like missing shadows for CSD apps.





However, there are quite a few themes out there that should work properly in Cinnamon, like Numix GTK Theme (available in the official repositories). To install Numix GTK Theme, use the following command:

sudo apt install numix-gtk-theme

You can also download the official Linux Mint themes, including the new Mint Y Theme from Linux Mint 18, by using the links below:

mint-themes (you'll also need libreoffice-style-mint because mint-themes depends on it, as well as mint-x-icons and mint-themes-gtk3, both linked below)

mint-themes-gtk3 (download the 3.18 version - it's for GTK 3.18, available in Ubuntu 16.04)

mint-y-theme

mint-x-icons

mint-y-icons

cinnamon-themes

Note: to be able to install "libreoffice-style-mint", you'll need to remove the "libreoffice-style-human" package, which is installed by default in Ubuntu 15.10.



To install them, download the deb files using the links above and place them in a folder - let's call it "deb" -, in your home directory (~/deb). Then use dpkg to install all the packages at once, using the following command:

sudo dpkg -i ~/deb/*.deb





In my test in Ubuntu 15.10, selecting "Quit" from the Cinnamon menu (which allows you to shutdown the computer) doesn't work properly - the dialog doesn't display any buttons other than "Cancel".





gsettings set org.cinnamon.desktop.session settings-daemon-uses-logind true gsettings set org.cinnamon.desktop.session session-manager-uses-logind true gsettings set org.cinnamon.desktop.session screensaver-uses-logind false

How to revert the changes

There are two ways you can revert the changes made by using the PPA above to install Cinnamon: either completely remove Cinnamon 3.0 or you can downgrade the packages installed from the PPA and use the Cinnamon version available in the official Ubuntu repositories.

sudo rm /etc/apt/sources.list.d/embrosyn-cinnamon*.list

sudo apt purge cinnamon* libcinnamon* nemo* libnemo-extension1 cjs libcjs0e blueberry gir1.2-cinnamondesktop-3.0 gir1.2-meta-muffin-0.0 libmuffin0 muffin-common

You may then use "autoremove" to remove all the depedencies that were installed and are no longer required:

sudo apt autoremove

By purging the PPA, you can downgrade Cinnamon to the version available in the official Ubuntu repositories. You can do this with PPA Purge:

sudo apt install ppa-purge sudo ppa-purge ppa:embrosyn/cinnamon

Here are the new Cinnamon accessibility and sound settings:The PPAs that uses to provide Cinnamon stable weren't updated with the latest Cinnamon 3.0. I did find 2 PPAs with Cinnamon 3.0:Once installed, log out and select Cinnamon from the login screen:If you have this issue, fix it by using the following commands:... and restart the session (logout or restart the system).I should also mention that I didn't encounter this issue in Ubuntu 16.04.Thanks to Kevin @ AskUbuntu for the fix!Firstly remove the PPA:Then, to completely remove Cinnamon, you can use the following command: