Goodbye Gnome, Hello Cinnamon

Goodbye Gnome, you cpu intensive, ram hogging, head ache inducing, shell crashing, extension breaking, piece of work.

https://forum.level1techs.com/t/official-post-your-desktop-mobile-screenshot-thread/74865/617?u=bedhedd

Hello Cinnamon

New setup

panel settings

Applets

Themes

The old setup

Before making the switch from my heavily customized gnome of

Recent issues

My desktop would frequently crash whenever I ran FAHClient. Looking at the journalctl the logs were super long and I got errors that included

Stack trace for context 0x558da954a890 ==Oct 11 11:01:08 
Master-of-Cooling gnome-shell
[51291]: Attempting to run a JS callback during garbage collection. This is most likely caused by destroying a Clutter actor or GTK widget with ::destroy signal connected, or using the destroy>

as well as

kernel: snd_hda_intel 0000:26:00.1: spurious response 0x3:0x0, last cmd=0x470700

When I searched this error, I found

Attempting to run a JS callback during garbage collection. This is most likely caused by destroying a Clutter actor or GTK widget with ::destroy signal connected, or using the destro>Oct 09 17:36:32 Master-of-Cooling gnome-shell[230104]: The offending callback was SourceFunc().

Web searches

These were pages I found when I searched my errors

this made me realize I had too many shell extensions.

The epiphany

In a club discord/on this forum, someone had recommended cinnamon as a DE that was similar to windows with very little resource demands. When I looked at screenshots, I realized that cinnamon did exactly what I had customized gnome for. There was a mention that cinnamon was less resource intensive than gnome.

I followed these instructions to install cinnamon on my laptop and desktop

After all the headache I went through for past versions of Gnome, I decided to make the switch. I think I tried Cinnamon out back when I was using antegros. I did not stay on it because I didn’t know how to customize it to my liking (ie the icons and taskbar). In those days I didn’t know how to search for linux problems/customization

Experiences so far

  • I don’t need to restart my shell every time I suspend or lock my computer
  • I don’t need to restart my shell just to get access to my panel
  • Folding at home does not crash the shell
  • Workrave plugin works

Changes I made to Cinnamon

  • I removed the text from the start menu
  • I changed the default icon to arc menu’s default instead of Fedora
  • I increased the icon sizes on the task bar
  • I moved the show desktop to the right side of the screen
  • I unpinned the default apps and repinned commonly used apps
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Cool Cinnamon is also my personal favorite DE in Linux atm.
The only thing i wished they added to the panel settings,
is just an easy option to set a little bit of transparancy.
Other then that a very nice DE that is easy to work with.

In regards to the Gnome desktop,
i don’t really get the philosophy behind it really.
I mean they keep stripping out usefull features,
that most people will re-enable with extentions etc.
I get that they want a clean modern look thats being different.
But yeah idk really…

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Yes, I don’t understand why they seperated tweaks from the settings and do not include it in the default install.

That’s a big reason why cinnamon is appealing for me. I am looking forward to less headaches from extensions breaking between updates to gnome. It also saves me 15-20 min of installing tweaks to reenable features the devs removed Such “features” include

  • enabling the maximize minimize buttons on the window
  • middle mouse hide windows
  • setting my guake hot key shortcut
  • changing the stock icons.
    All are actions that requires installing the tweaks tool.

Other qol extensions include installing extensions such as

  • dash to panel
  • sound input selection menu
  • start menu
  • shell tile window tiling manager
  • desktop wallpaper changer

These are things I need to do every time I do a fresh install.

Installing all these extensions and the tweak tools requires time and a ethernet connection. Resources not every user will have the luxary to do so.

I’ve been running Cinnamon on Fedora for a few months now. Initially had some odd sound issues, but that seems to be straightened out. And it looks more polished and has fewer bugs than some other DE’s I’ve had the misfortune of dealing with. Very nice desktop…

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I really like Cinnamon; it’s real easy to work with and doesn’t get in the way. :slight_smile:

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case desktop in

  1. sway
  2. jwm w/ compton
  3. plasma5
  4. lxqt + kwin
  5. lxqt + (jwm || openbox) w/ compton
  6. mate

I seriously have no reason to go with anything else. I don’t mind what others are using, it’s their choices, I just prefer minimalist software above all, then only after full fat DE. Sway is the easiest thing to configure and has sane defaults. JWM is a little tricky, but I got used to it (I can help anyone who wants to try it, or just give my config if people request it).

To me, vanilla GNOME Shell seems more coherent than the extension madness in Ubuntu. Once you get used to how GS works (like, if you try default Fedora or install GS session and disable extensions in Ubuntu), things start making sense. If GS wasn’t such a massive resource hog, I could probably get used to its workflow. I never minimize windows and usually run stuff either in full screen or stacked, which is why I got used to sway very easily, before that hating tilling WMs. Some time ago, I used to use Meta + [1-0] keys in Unity 7, then Meta + [1-0,z-.] in Plasma with Latte-Dock, never having to minimize stuff and sometimes putting windows on different workspaces (the keyboard shortcut on Latte-Dock would take me to the designated workspace, or just bring forward a window on top of another).

Nowadays I prefer minimalists software. Sway (and tilling WMs in general) never hides windows, just switches workspace. I also use JWM in a similar fashion (combined with Poor Man’s Tilling WM). GNOME Shell works the same, people just have to get used to it (I don’t get why people like the GNOME Stack, but ok…)

On a completely unrelated note, I’m typing this message from a Pi 4 8gb running Ubuntu 20.10 on an SD Card (and been watching quite a lot of youtube and peertube videos too). This would have not been possible with anything more resource intensive than LXQt (and even LXQt + KWin was lagging). I now don’t need to bother with fast PCs (I prefer low power consumption). Bonus points that I can move my JWM and Sway configs between different PCs and distros (my main PC is running Void with Sway, unfortunately, Sway on Ubuntu is giving me headaches, so I just put JWM on it - and I can’t get kms or fkms to work on Void on the Pi, I compiled an aarch64-musl for it, but sadly, it doesn’t work as a desktop, at least not yet, but it’s insanely fast, since I got that running on an ssd).

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does anyone know how to suspend to ram on cinnamon? It isn’t in the same menu as power and lock

turns out it’s in the power off menu

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I learned yesterday how to add a second taskbar for cinnamon on my second monitor.

When switching to cinnamon, I was a bit bothered by the bottom taskbar not duplicating itself on both monitors

primary monitor


configuration

secondary monitor

I learned a bit more how to mess with the applets and panel settings. Also the panel that you are actively editing will be highlighted red


if Cinnamon had shipped with Numix-Square-light, I probably would have not been as exploratory.

Unfortunately I had to switch from Cinnamon to KDE because I couldn’t get Window Capture working in OBS.

Related to that, OBS has long not been able to capture terminal windows in window capture for really bizarre reasons.

But on Cinnamon, everything was just showing up blank in OBS Window Capture.

You could use XSHM capture, but that causes nasty tearing and artifacts.

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When Fedora 33 first came out, Cinnamon was a crash fest for me. It seems it was partly a SELinux problem, but also other undefined problems. For a few weeks now it has been pretty solid, with only one or two crashes. I guess that’s because GNOME is Fedora’s default, and that’s where bug squashing efforts are first applied.

Anyway Cinnamon is now running swimmingly. I occasionally find myself using some applet in GNOME, or having to run XFCE due to its ability to run without a compositor. But I’m spending about 80% of my time in Cinnamon.

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Yeah, I usually stagger my updates.

That’s good to hear my man

I tried a few Cinnamon based distros over the years, I think the common trend is some distros catch the bugs better than others–always found Cinnamon a mix of “old” Gnome and Xfce without the amount of extreme trade-offs. Gnome’s stupid leadership is why I found myself hopping between Xfce, Cinnamon and KDE.
The only weirdness I ever experienced is graphical tearing with notebooks which have switchable graphics–whenever I need to use Linux on notebook I’ve had to just settle with Intel or AMD IGP.

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I think Mint with Cinnamon is super nice and very stable. :slight_smile:

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