Posts tagged Gnome

Gnome 3 fiasco has come and gone, oh wait, it’s still here, but at least people are hacking away at it to make it a bit better.  We’ve been seeing apps to help customize the devastation and now Linux Mint has forked the default gnome-shell and started a project that gives you an option of a different shell called Cinnamon.  We have introduced the Cinnamon to the limbo repository for testing and I’ve only heard positive things about it from those that have tested it. Sabayon running Cinnamon below:

Here you can see Cinnamon with the menu system open, looks a bit rude at first, but functions quite well.

A bit busy

Pull back and select the application you want

So the great thing about this that I love is the old traditional desktop feel that I am most comfortable in.  No huge icons and drilling down through more huge icons to find an application.  The menu system gets you were you need to get quickly.  Call me old, but I enjoy the simple desktop and hate huge icons.  I’m glad to see others feel the same and are actually producing forks and hacks.  Gnome devs need to, well I’m not gonna get on that rant or I’ll be writing a book.

So what about the negatives?  Well, I’m not gonna say that there is negatives due to the fact that Cinnamon is young and new and is gonna grow quickly with changes to make it better.  Like right now the customization abilities are very limited.  The gnome-tweak-tool will allow you to make some changes.  A trick I found to do was to log into the regular gnome session and use gnome-tweak-tool to make changes and than logout and return to the cinnamon session where most things will stick.  You can’t change window borders, but I can live with that for now.  Linux Mint has already said that in the next version that customization tools are high priority.

I should clear the air here incase people are scared to screw up their gnome default by installing Cinnamon.  When you install Cinnamon it creates a new login session called Cinnamon.  So when you are at your login screen, choose Cinnamon from the session to log into it.  You can log back into regular gnome by logging out and than choose Gnome in the session.  So no fear, you won’t loose nor harm your gnome default session.  If you are using lxdm, make sure you have the latest version from limbo repo installed otherwise lxdm can’t start the session.

Sabayon needs to make some changes to it, such as branding the menu button and we will be changing the category it is in now that Gentoo has added it to portage under gnome-extra.  There is discussion about an idea of making Cinnamon the default session in Sabayon 8.  Remember the regular gnome session will be there also, so don’t go yelling at your monitor we are crazy if we do such a thing, just select Gnome for your session if you are not a Cinnamon fan.  I encourage everyone to take a look at it at least once and give it a try.  With Cinnamon available, I actually installed Gnome back on to my main system.