Now, granted that Cinnamon will definitely run harder when you get desklets, applets, extensions, and other things going but for the purpose of just testing the base values, this was very good to see. I really canâ€™t argue with those numbers. My CPU also sat at around 3% utilization with Firefox and LibreOffice running. With them open, 40+ tabs running etc, it only used just shy of 800MB of RAM. Surprisingly Cinnamon ran really lightly on my machine much to my shock, it actually ran REALLY lightly using just shy of 400MB of RAM when I had all programs like Firefox and LibreOffice closed.

So with that being said there isnâ€™t really much to discuss in relevance to default software.

Default SoftwareĬinnamon unlike other Desktop Environments doesnâ€™t really have itâ€™s own suite of software specifically created for the environment, instead it uses GNOME software.Ī couple of things have been forked for Cinnamon such as the Settings Manager, but you wonâ€™t find software like, â€œCtextâ€ or â€œCinnaImageViewerâ€ or something included with Cinnamon for itâ€™s own custom applications. For those of who who love to theme, Cinnamon or BE:SHELL (an advanced system using KDE as itâ€™s backend) are the ways to go, but BE:SHELL requires knowledge of CSS programming, so unless you are truly hardcore, Cinnamon takes the cake on this one. I would put Cinnamon on the same level if not even above KDE and GNOME in relevance to graphical customization. If youâ€™re interested in Desklets, Applets, Extensions etc you need to visit You ALSO can add more customization to Cinnamon by adding extensions.

Using GTK 3.x Cinnamon can easily be customized with more themes than you can shake a stick at, and using applets Cinnamon has the ability to be customized further. I actually personally havenâ€™t used it a great deal, I never really got into it and on the Cinnamon bandwagon, but I can see the appeal of it for many. Customization and Default AppearanceĬinnamon is beautiful, and extremely customizable, and there is a reason many people have grown to love it. I could have installed another distro with Cinnamon, but for the sake of this overview, Mint Cinnamon would suffice. I decided to use Linux Mint Cinnamon simply because the last distro I installed was Lubuntu for the LXDE overview, and installing Cinnamon overtop of LXDE on a Lubuntu system seemed awfully silly so for simplicity sake I just installed Mint. The machine I used for this has the following specs: When most people think Cinnamon they think of Linux Mint because that is who developed it, and what Cinnamon is primarily used for, however, Cinnamon can also be installed on other distributions and therefore I felt that an overview was warranted even for users who have no interest in using Linux Mint for whatever reasons they may have. However as of Cinnamon 2.0, Cinnamon has become itâ€™s own desktop environment. The developers of Linux Mint from how I understand it, didnâ€™t like the tablet inspired GUI that GNOME went with, but they enjoyed the back end features and implementations, so they forked the code and created Cinnamon in order to keep a more traditional look and feel to the desktop environment, while still keeping up with the times and latest technologies.

Desklets linux mint