Cinnamon 3.0 released, now with two-finger scrolling

Cinnamon is a fork of the GNOME project born to please Linux Mint users that were unsatisfied with the direction GNOME had taken. Today that very project reaches version 3, here’s Cinnamon 3.0 .

Cinnamon 3.0 New features

Cinnamon 3.0 boasts a revamped flat look that we often see in other desktop environments, still it retains that typical Mint-ish feel that its users love so much. The features are not so exciting as one might expect, it is more of finishing touch than a real game-changer. So without further ado let’s list (directly from the official site) the new features:

• Window management improvements on tiling, mapping and unmapping windows, compositor’s window groups and tracking of full screen windows
• Improved out of the box touchpad support (edge-scrolling and two-finger-scrolling can now be configured independently and are both enabled by default)
• New accessibility and sound settings (both rewritten as native cinnamon-settings modules)
• Battery powered devices can be renamed
• Different favorite applications can now be set for plain-text, documents and source code files
• Panel launchers now include application actions
• Animation effects are now enabled by default on dialogs and menus
• Favorites and system options can now be disabled in the menu applet
• The photo-frame desklet now also scans subdirectories
• Improved support for GTK 3.20, Spotify 0.27, Viber

But a video is always better:

How to install it on Ubuntu 14.04/15.10/16.04

Installing Cinnamon 3.0 is pretty easy on Ubuntu>14.04; still you won’t get a complete experience without the right themes and icon set. Mint-y is the name of the new theme/icon-set that will be used in Linux Mint 18, however they are not released yet and you will have to use mint-x. To get everything done you can simply execute the following commands:

Beware: These repositories are external and not related to Ubuntu or Canonical, by adding them you are allowing this software in your machine, thus trusting it. But software isn’t always secure and can be malicious pay attention at what you do.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:embrosyn/cinnamon
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:noobslab/themes
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:noobslab/icons
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install cinnamon
sudo apt-get install lmint-theme
sudo apt-get install lmint-icons

Also keep in mind the lmint-theme  and lmint-icons  packages might not be available for the version of Ubuntu you are using (in my test I had to use Precise packages since Xenial ones are not available).

Conclusions

You’ve just met what’s going to be Linux Mint 18 very new face. Although Linux Mint has been hacked just a few months ago, much of its users are still there and this is an exciting news for them. Remember all you saw is not yet complete and installing Cinnamon 3 on Ubuntu might not give you the best experience possible.

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mark

The IT guy with a slight look of boredom in his eyes. Freelancer. Current interests: Kubernetes, Tensorflow, shiny new things.

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