There’s plenty of Debian-based distributions out there. So many, in fact, that many of them have derivatives of their own. Ubuntu has been a leading distribution for many years, and it owes much of its fame from its Debian roots. Enter many Ubuntu-based distributions which add to the great works done on Ubuntu.
LinuxMint is probably my favorite of the derivatives. It started out as a more feature-rich, multi-media version of Ubuntu. It also added its own (better looking) theme. I’ve always disliked the default themes in Ubuntu, whether it be orange, brown, or purple, although I give them point for originality. LinuxMint brought a minty green flavor to the Linux desktop.
I’ve recently posted that I can’t stand Unity or Gnome 3, and I was searching for an alternative in a more modern distribution. I could have went with Debian Stable or CentOS 6, which still use Gnome 2, but I wanted a distribution that uses more up-to-date versions of software like Blender, LibreOffice, Firefox, and such.
The problem with that scenario is that there aren’t many “modern” distros which use something other than Gnome 3 or Unity as their default desktop environment. I tried to use XFCE4, but it just wasn’t for me. I can use it in spurts, but I wouldn’t want to use it permanently. I wanted something that looked fresh.
For a few days, I tried to adapt to KDE4. You know things are rough in my Linuxland if I’m trying to adapt to KDE. I was getting by and actually liking the experience until I tried to do a little Java game development. For some reason, anytime I switched my Java app to fullscreen and then back to a window, it would disable my second display. This peeved me off enough that I just installed Windows 7. I’ve been using it for the past month.
Today, I was messing around on my laptop, which happens to have LinuxMint 12 installed on it, and I remembered reading something about a Gnome 2 fork that the LinuxMint crew was working on called Cinnamon. I thought, “what the hell, I’ll give it a shot”.
It was impressive. It was actually more than impressive. It was exactly where I thought Gnome should have went. It’s like a better looking version of Gnome 2, with all the same Gnome 2 features. It felt like home, which is coincidentally like the subtitle of the Cinnamon homepage:
“Love your Linux, Feel at Home, Get things Done!”
This is a great slogan, because it really goes right along with how I felt about Cinnamon. I loved using Linux on the desktop again. I felt at home. I bet I’ll be able to get things done in it as well.
I rarely use that laptop, so next I’ll be installing LinuxMint on my main desktop again. I’m going to cross my fingers and hope that their isn’t some annoying bug that makes me wish I’d stayed on Windows 7.
It’s pretty sad when a Linux advocate, that loves working in the command line, doesn’t want to use Linux because of the sad state of desktop environments. I wish the main developers of this type of software would lose the “unify everything” mentality and make the desktop just work.
Hopefully, I’ll be able to give Cinnamon a thumbs up on my main desktop and just stay in Linux heaven. I’ll post my results later.