Install Cinnamon Desktop Environment on Linux Ubuntu, via PPA. Terminal commands (how to) install the latest Cinnamon Desktop on Ubuntu 16.04, Ubuntu 15.04, Ubuntu 14.04, Ubuntu 15.10 and Ubuntu 14.10 Systems. Cinnamon 2.8 is the new version and will be featured in Linux Mint 17.3 “Rosa” planned for the end of November and in LMDE 2 “Betsy”.
Cinnamon 2.8 comes with many UI and System changes. The Cinnamon system tray now also supports indicators. If you don’t like indicators, you can turn this off in “System Settings” -> “General” -> “Enable support for indicators”. This results in forcing all applications which use indicators to fallback to using status icons.
Here are a few tips to recognize status icons and indicators:
- Status icons are rendered by their application, often using GTK menus and widgets.
- Indicators are rendered by Cinnamon, with a Clutter menu which looks similar to the panel itself.
- Status icons can have tooltips and a context menu, indicators cannot.
- In the Logs section of “Looking glass” (Alt+F2+lg), you can see what status icons (“systray”) and what indicators (“indicator”) are loaded by Cinnamon.
The power applet received many bug fixes and the way it detects and handles multiple batteries was significantly improved. Connected devices and batteries are now displayed using the data provided by their manufacturer. In the screenshot above for instance, what was generically described as a “Wireless Mouse” in Cinnamon 2.6 is now described more accurately as a “Logitech M325”.
The workspace switcher applet is now able to show a visual representation of your workspaces, with little rectangles corresponding to each window inside of them.
The Cinnamon logout sequence was reviewed and some changes were introduced to make it faster and to make it look smoother. Session Manager has also been improved. The timeout for the session “EXIT” phase was reduced to 1 second, and the settings daemon and the window manager, which are respectively responsible for painting applications with the right GTK theme and for rendering window titlebars are now the last programs to die.
Cinnamon 2.8 also features:
- Better support for QT5 applications, which now look more native and use the GTK theme.
- Better XSMP support
- Better logs (You can enable logs to ~/.xsession-errors via the “org.cinnamon.SessionManager debug” gsettings key. Logs now also include time delta information to help identify cases where an application makes the login or logout sequence lag).
- A fully configurable auto-start blacklist (The key is in “org.cinnamon.SessionManager autostart-blacklist”. This was only partly configurable in previous versions.).
Install Cinnamon 2.8 on Ubuntu
Run the following commands to add the Cinnamon PPA on Ubuntu Systems:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:moorkai/cinnamon
Once you are done, run the following commands to install Cinnamon from the PPA:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install cinnamon
Please note that the process may take some time, depending on the speed of your internet connection. Once everything is downloaded and installed, please restart and log in to Cinnamon.
Remove or Downgrade Cinnamon PPA
If you aren’t happy with the Cinnamon Desktop Environment, you can downgrade the PPA by running the following command:
Credit: http://segfault.linuxmint.com/2015/11/cinnamon-2-8-released/