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Cinnamon is a GNOME Shell fork which tries to offer a layout similar to GNOME 2: it comes with a panel at the bottom by default (optionally, you can use 2 panels or a panel at the top) that supports autohide, panel applets, a classic system tray, GNOME2-like notifications and so on, but using GNOME 3.

Hot corner: workspace selection
Hot corner: window selection

Cinnamon 1.4 has been released today and the major change in this release is a new hot corner behavior which can now use either workspace selection (like Compiz "Expo") or window selection (like Compiz "Scale"). In expo mode, you can add or remove workspaces and when you hover a workspace, the windows are arranged like in the overview so you can see all available windows (which you can drag onto another workspace, etc.). Also, the hot corner position can now be changed.


Cinnamon Settings applet

Other changes in Cinnamon 1.4:
  • Panel edit mode
  • A new Cinnamon Settings panel applet which lets you restart Cinnamon, start Looking Glass, restore all settings to default, quickly access panel settings, and so on (see screenshot above)
  • Option to only use workspaces on primary monitor
  • Cinnamon menu editor (forked from alacarte)
  • Improved support for RTL languages
  • Added 'Visible on all workspaces' and "Move to workspace" to the window list
  • Favourites improvements (you can add an application to the favourites by drag and drop, etc.)
  • Many bug fixes

Here's a video I've recorded, demoing the latest Cinnamon 1.4:


(video link)


I've recorded the video on an old laptop so it's kind of choppy, sorry about that.


Install Cinnamon


Cinnamon 1.4 is already available in the Linux Mint 12 repositories.

For Ubuntu 12.04 or 11.10, Cinnamon is available in a new PPA - add it and install Cinnamon 1.4 using the commands below:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gwendal-lebihan-dev/cinnamon-stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install cinnamon

For other Linux distributions, see the Cinnamon download page.

Thanks to Graham Davies for the tip!