Cinnamon is fine as it sits right now, it's my main desktop
Went nowhere my spinning platters! Mint's popularity has exploded at the expense of Ubuntu's main distro, and both Cinnamon and MATE have a lot to do with that. Unless Linux Mint goes away, I don't see Cinnamon going away either. If it does, some new theming in MATE along with it's upcoming port to GTK3 and using Compiz w/o Unity could probably copy most or all of it's functionality. Already there is talk of adapting MATE to Wayland.
If Cinnamon did not exist, I would probably use its antecedant, which is gnome-shell with the frippery extensions as I did before I discovered MATE. This required pinning gnome-shell and all dependencies through each development cycle and for several weeks to a month therafter, until the Frippery mantainers could catch up. If that became non-viable I would switch to MATE, if that died too I would probably switch all my machines to IceWM like on my laptop.
I do not like and will not use a touch-style environment. I don't own any smartphones and have no reason to copy their interface styles, so unmodified gnome-shell or Unity are out.
At this point I simply intend to keep using Cinnamon and reject any update to anything that breaks it. I suspect that Mint will continue to offer it in mantainance mode even if all development stops. Some software is perfectly good as it sits and requires only bug-fixes and unbreaking any problems caused by changes in newer libraries. If it never supports Wayland, X isn't going away and there are a hell of a lot of smaller footprint traditional DE's and ultralight DE's that aren't going away either. Worst case, you simply stop updating anything but kernels and maybe video drivers on the basis that what works today works tomorrow with the same hardware.
Cinnamon had to be forked from GNOME because of GNOME's contempt for the community as expressed by their intentional breaking of extensions on every upgrade cycle. They forgot that a lot of people don't WANT anyone's standard interface and don't want anyone telling them how to structure their desktop. Without that contempt, Frippery would be much easier to mantain, and Mint et all would use either Frippery or the similar MGSE extensions they developed in-house. GNOME's willful breaking of extensions reminds me of Apple trying to un-jailbreak their hardware and forced Mint to fork their code entirely to create Cinnamon.
Originally posted by Honton
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If Cinnamon did not exist, I would probably use its antecedant, which is gnome-shell with the frippery extensions as I did before I discovered MATE. This required pinning gnome-shell and all dependencies through each development cycle and for several weeks to a month therafter, until the Frippery mantainers could catch up. If that became non-viable I would switch to MATE, if that died too I would probably switch all my machines to IceWM like on my laptop.
I do not like and will not use a touch-style environment. I don't own any smartphones and have no reason to copy their interface styles, so unmodified gnome-shell or Unity are out.
At this point I simply intend to keep using Cinnamon and reject any update to anything that breaks it. I suspect that Mint will continue to offer it in mantainance mode even if all development stops. Some software is perfectly good as it sits and requires only bug-fixes and unbreaking any problems caused by changes in newer libraries. If it never supports Wayland, X isn't going away and there are a hell of a lot of smaller footprint traditional DE's and ultralight DE's that aren't going away either. Worst case, you simply stop updating anything but kernels and maybe video drivers on the basis that what works today works tomorrow with the same hardware.
Cinnamon had to be forked from GNOME because of GNOME's contempt for the community as expressed by their intentional breaking of extensions on every upgrade cycle. They forgot that a lot of people don't WANT anyone's standard interface and don't want anyone telling them how to structure their desktop. Without that contempt, Frippery would be much easier to mantain, and Mint et all would use either Frippery or the similar MGSE extensions they developed in-house. GNOME's willful breaking of extensions reminds me of Apple trying to un-jailbreak their hardware and forced Mint to fork their code entirely to create Cinnamon.
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