Cinnamon 3.0 has been released and chances are you’re itching to upgrade to it!

Well, first hold your horses.

This latest stable release of the popular GNOME-fork brings a modest set of improvements to the table. As highlighted by Linux Mint lead ‘Clem’, you’ll find the following highlights:

Window management improvements

Improved touchpad support, including edge-scrolling & two-finger-scrolling

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

You can rename battery powered devices

Set different apps to open plain-text, documents and source code files

Application actions added to panel launchers

D ialogs and menus have animated effects

ialogs and menus have animated effects ‘Favorites’ and system options can be disabled in the menu applet

Improved support for GTK 3.20, Spotify 0.27, and Viber

Worth upgrading for? If so…

Install Cinnamon 3.0 on Ubuntu

As of right-this-cherry-picking-second Cinnamon 3.0 is not available to install on Ubuntu through its official PPA.

So, to install Cinnamon 3.0 on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, you’ll need to add a community PPA.

The one we’re featuring below is the only one to currently build Cinnamon 3.0 for Xenial users (it also has 3.0 packages for 15.10, too).

Packages installed from this PPA come with no warranties or guarantees. You use it at your own risk. Breakages may occur.

(Though it is worth us noting that this PPA has the blessing of Moorkai the developer behind the widely used Cinnamon PPA we often recommend).

Caution thrown, open a new Terminal window and enter the following commands carefully to add the stable Cinnamon PPA and fetch the packages:

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

Once Cinnamon pulls in all of its packages and dependencies it will unpack and install them. Once done, it’s time to log-out of your existing session and/or reboot your system.

Select Cinnamon Desktop

At the Unity Greeter click on the Ubuntu icon (also known as the ‘session-selector) and select ‘Cinnamon’ from the list. Proceed to log in as usual and Cinnamon will load up before your eyes…

To remove Cinnamon run:

sudo ppa-purge ppa:embrosyn/cinnamon