Installing the popular ‘Cinnamon’ desktop environment on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS is about to get a little harder.

The maintainer of the most widely used PPA for the GNOME 3 fork has confirmed his intention to retire it. Development builds not aimed at regular users will continue to be provided through a separate package archive.

Cinnamon is the default desktop of the increasingly popular Ubuntu-based Linux Mint distribution. While previous versions of Ubuntu allow the shell to be installed through the Ubuntu repositories directly, 14.04 LTS users have needed to add a third-party PPA.

But now this PPA is being shut down.

Why?

Gwendal Le Bihan, the community member and maintainer of the PPA, explained the decision to shutter the archive on Ask Ubuntu:

“The [Cinnamon] stable PPA is indeed no longer being maintained. [A] nightly PPA is being kept for development purposes and should not be used on any sort of production machine (it can and will break at any time). I don’t have an alternative to offer Ubuntu users at the moment, apart from switching to a distribution that does support Cinnamon. There are many such distributions out there, and I’m only hoping for someone to (finally) step up on Ubuntu’s side to provide proper packages to its users.”

The popularity of the alternative desktop shell means that it is unlikely that a stable build will remain entirely out of reach of Ubuntu users for too long. Alternatively, Cinnamon fans may wish to switch to Linux Mint, which recently announced its plan to base its next three releases on the latest LTS of Ubuntu.

Do you use Cinnamon on Ubuntu? Will you miss this PPA? Do you know of an alternative?