Ah Gnome3, KDE 4.x, Unity… how the GUI desktop landscape has changed over the past year or so for Linux. Honestly, I haven’t been a fan of any of them.

KDE, it’s nice but experience has been it just seems slow. I’m not sure how to explain it, but just basic interaction with desktop has always left me with this feeling of it being sluggish. Once upon a time I was a huge KDE fan, likely from my years of using Slackware for everything. I actually did just install it at work, the ATI card I have there doesn’t play nice with Gnome3, therefore Cinnamon as well.

Gnome3, just feels like a mess. A vanilla Gnome3 install just isn’t very intuitive. Gnome has a trend of trying radical things that are just frustrating. Remember when Nautilus went spatial? Ugh. Drove me nuts a time I was actually turning into a huge fan of Dropline Gnome. With Gnome3 was it really necessary to for ctrl-alt up/down instead of left/right for desktop switching? I only have over a decade of muscle memory there.

Unity… it’s interesting. I think a big reason I tend to stay away from it is my negative experiences with it when it first came out. It was glitchy on my hardware, locking up at random times. In all fairness with 11.10 it worked fine. I think I just had developed a bad taste for it by then. Unity has no problem running on an ATI card though *nudge Gnome3*.

Now Cinnamon. The only fault I can find with it is it’s Gnome3 roots means it has the same hardware issues. My laptop with an Nvidia card runs it great though. Cinnamon just seems to be what Gnome3 should have been.

Cinnamon has lower panel with the application menu. I like the fact you can add apps to it real easy, acting like a dock. I have a Macbook I use primarily for working from home, I’m used to having a dock (and at the bottom of the screen, Unity). However it builds on Gnome3’s always having one empty virtual desktop. Over all I find the virtual desktop management which is pretty much all Gnome3 to be an improvement. It’s real easy to move applications from desktop to desktop. When visually managing the desktops it’s vertival, however Cinnamon kept the left/right key bindings and visual transitions. I don’t have to relearn anything.

Over all, it’s appearance is a little rough, but the functionality has been a perfect fit. About the only improvement I’d make is a top panel that functions like on Unity and my Mac, holding the current application context menus and such. I just prefer that approach.

If you are running Mint and haven’t tried it yet, sudo apt-get install cinnamon-session and give it a go. It’s been the most intuitively easy to use desktop released this year.