Yesterday I decided to give Cinnamon a try on my main desktop. My main desktop runs Fedora 33 Workstation edition and I have been fully enjoying GNOME on it. It is modern, simple, and yet, quite fast on my machine.
So, why the change?
Things got boring. This is great on machine that has to be rock-solid, and Fedora Workstation edition has been just that for me over the years (ever since Fedora Next - around release version 20).
Instead of breaking my whole machine, spending few hours on re-configuring the whole new distribution, I decided to install Cinnamon and give it a proper spin. Last time I tried it was on the laptop, sometimes last year, when I was trying out Linux Mint.
Installation
Install was simple as
sudo dnf group install "Cinnamon Desktop"
After which I had to log-out, then log back in. Since I want to have everything “as the authors intended it to be”, I also followed up the process with disabling GDM and enabling LightDM:
sudo systemctl disable gdm
sudo systemctl enable lightdm
Thoughts?
I really like the Cinnamon environment. On Fedora it has been configured with Aqua/Blue colors across the environment. Although I really like “native green” that’s on Mint, I have to admin, aqua looks a bit better to me now.
Cinnamon as such is pretty snappy, has slim title bars, menu bars, and everything (Yaaay! I got my vertical space back).
I’m also impressed by the sheer number of various themes, plugins, extensions, and overall ability to customize the environment. I forgot how many options were removed from both GNOME and integrated applications in the name of simplifying. Having all those options back, somehow seems refreshing.
Who knows, perhaps I’ll get bored with the environment and switch once again back to GNOME, but for now I’ll enjoy the Cinnamon in my hat.