Cinnamon, the GNOME2-like GNOME Shell fork, has reached version 1.2, which is considered fully stable. The new release brings many new features, but also separates Cinnamon even more from GNOME Shell.

- Desktop effects - for now, there are only 2 animation plugins for various window events (close, minimize, maximize, etc): fade and scale, with 30 transition styles:

- Desktop layouts: you can now select from 3 available desktop layouts: traditional (one panel at the bottom), flipped (one panel at the top) or classic (one panel at the top and one at the bottom):

- Cinnamon Settings: Even though you've seen Cinnamon Settings in our previous Cinnamon post, this is actually the first public release for the new Cinnamon settings tool, which you can see in the screenshots above. Using it, you can customize desktop effects, change the theme, enable or disable extensions and other tweaks.

- Applets: these are some special extensions that make use of a new API and they don't depend on the Cinnamon version. Cinnamon 1.2 comes with 5 such applets: accessibility, recent documents, removable drives, trash and display (xRandR monitor control).

significantly improved menu (you can press enter after a search to launch the first item; also, Administration and Preferences categories are back, like in Gnome 2)

As we wrote in our previous post, Cinnamon now uses Muffin, a Mutter fork, as its window manager

GNOME Shell themes are no longer compatible with Cinnamon

The Overview has been replaced by a desktop Scale plugin (also triggered by CTRL + ALT + UP/DOWN). You can still switch between desktops by using the built-in panel desktop switcher or keyboard shortcuts (CTRL + ALT + LEFT/RIGHT)

Download Cinnamon

Cinnamon (.deb)

Muffin (.zip - includes all required .deb files)

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:merlwiz79/cinnamon-ppa sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get install cinnamon

via Cinnamon

Here's a Cinnamon 1.2 video I've just recorded:To install Cinnamon in Ubuntu, either download the deb files via GitHub (both Cinnamon and Muffin are required):Or use the Cinnamon PPA