[Discuss] Desktop Managers

[John Blomfield]

Hi,

Its sometime since I've seen much discussion lately about distros and in 
particular Desktops, and I was wondering how many are using Cinnamon at 
the moment. I would be interested in hearing your comments.

As a longtime KDE user, that suffered through the transition from KDE3 
to KDE4, I am not looking forward to the transition from KDE4 to KDE5. 
Hopefully, KDE have learned not to release stuff as "stable" before it 
actually works well enough to make it useful. However, KDE4 has proved 
to be a rock solid Desktop for a few years now and I use it exclusively 
on all my computers along with openSuse distro. I have noticed however 
that improvements have been limited recently to minor updates as 
development efforts are now concentrating on KDE5.

As a result I have been looking at some alternatives and I like the look 
of Cinnamon. Originally, developed for LinuxMint, Cinnamon is now 
available on some other distros but is notably absent from others. 
OpenSuse does not consider it ready for support since it is still "under 
heavy development" although I have installed Cinnamon 2.3 successfully 
from one of the OpenSuse "Portals" as a Desktop option at the login 
screen. I have also installed Fedora's Cinnamon as a boot option on a 
spare partition so I can try it out. Fedora is always at the bleeding edge.

Cinnamon 2, which is a fork of the Gnome Shell, is now not dependent on 
installing Gnome 3 so you don't need all that overhead. I did take a 
look at Gnome 3 and my reaction was Ugh! My first impression of just a 
couple of hours poking around in Cinnamon 2.3 is that I like it. It has 
many of the features of KDE4 Plasma Desktop, panel applets and desklets 
(widgets) and has dumped Nautilus. Anyway, I would like to hear other 
peoples reaction.

By the way I haven't tried the Mate desktop since it seems a bit retro.

John

-- 
John Blomfield
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Old John B's Linux Noteshttp://www.oldjohnbslinux.wordpress.com