Editing Cinnamon (desktop environment) (section)

==History==
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As with many other desktop environments based off of GNOME, including [[Canonical (company)|Canonical's]] [[Unity (user interface)|Unity]], Cinnamon was the result of disapproval of the GNOME team's abandonment of a traditional desktop experience in April 2011. Until then, GNOME (i.e. GNOME 2) had included the traditional desktop metaphor, but in GNOME 3, this was entirely replaced with GNOME Shell, which lacked a taskbar-like panel and other basic features of a conventional desktop. The elimination of these basic features was unacceptable to the developers of distributions such as [[Linux Mint|Mint]] and [[Ubuntu (operating system)|Ubuntu]], which are geared to users who want interfaces that they are familiar with.

To overcome these differences, the Linux Mint team initially set out to develop extensions for GNOME Shell to replace the abandoned features. The results of this effort were known as the "Mint GNOME Shell Extensions" or MGSE. Meanwhile, the MATE desktop environment had also been forked from GNOME 2. Linux Mint 12, released in November 2011, subsequently included both, thereby giving users a choice of either GNOME 3 with the MGSE or a MATE desktop that closely resembled GNOME 2.

However, even with MGSE, GNOME 3 was still largely missing the comforts of GNOME 2 and was not well received by the user community. At the time, some of the missing features could not be replaced by extensions, and it seemed that extensions would not be viable in the long run due to concerns of significant changes upstream from the GNOME team. Moreover, the GNOME developers were not willing to cooperate with the wishes of the Mint developers. To give the Mint developers finer control over the development process, GNOME Shell was forked as "Project Cinnamon" in January 2012.<ref name="introducing cinnamon">{{cite web |last=Lefebvre |first=Clement |date=2 January 2012 |title=Introducing Cinnamon |url=https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=1910 |url-status=live |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20120229103411/https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=1910 |archive-date=29 February 2012 |work=The Linux Mint Blog}}</ref>

Gradually, various core applications were adapted by the Mint developers. Beginning with version 1.2, released in January 2012, Cinnamon's window manager is [[Muffin (software)|Muffin]], which was originally a fork of GNOME 3's [[Mutter (window manager)|Mutter]].<ref name="cinnamon 1.2">{{cite web|url=http://cinnamon.linuxmint.com/?p=119|title=Cinnamon 1.2 released|last=Lefebvre|first=Clement|date=23 January 2012|work=cinnamon.linuxmint.com|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20121101211537/http://cinnamon.linuxmint.com/?p=119|archive-date=1 November 2012|url-status=dead}}</ref> Similarly, since September 2012 (version 1.6 onwards), Cinnamon includes the [[Nemo (file manager)|Nemo]] file manager which was forked from [[Nautilus (file manager)|Nautilus]]. Cinnamon-Settings, included since May 2013 (version 1.8 onwards), combines the functionality of GNOME-Control-Center with that of Cinnamon-Settings, and made it possible to manage and update applets, extensions, desklets and themes through the control-center. Gnome-Screensaver was also forked and is now called Cinnamon-Screensaver.

Since October 2013 (version 2.0 onwards), Cinnamon is no longer a frontend of GNOME like [[Unity (user interface)|Unity]] or [[GNOME Shell]], but a discrete and completely independent desktop environment. Although Cinnamon is still heavily built on GNOME technologies and utilizes [[GTK]], it no longer requires GNOME itself to be installed.

Further improvements in later versions include a desktop grid, wildcard support in file searches, multi-process settings daemon, desktop actions in the panel launcher, separate processes for desktop handling and file manager in Nemo; an additional desktop panel layout option that offers a more modern looking theme and grouped windows; improved naming for duplicate applications in the menu (i.e. [[Flatpak]] vs. [[deb (file format)|deb]] packages), pinned files in Nemo, touchpad gestures, and an emphasis on performance improvements.