Lefebvre Introduces GNOME 3 Fork

Clement Lefebvre, founder and all around head honcho of the Linux Mint project, formally introduced his vision of the desktop to the Linux masses recently. "Under the hood Cinnamon is forked from Gnome Shell and based on Mutter and Gnome 3. The latest release, Cinnamon 1.1.3, brings stability and improvements to what has already become our favorite desktop."

Cinnamon is a new desktop environment which seeks to bring traditionally excepted features back to the Linux desktop. Lefebvre said Cinnamon is designed to leverage "new technology and implements our vision." Lefebvre's vision is "the computer works for you and makes it easy for you to be productive. Things aren't hidden away but easy to access. With easy to use interfaces, a familiar layout, advanced technologies and principles you've already got to to use in Linux Mint, you'll quickly find yourself at home. Configuration is also something important in Cinnamon as one of its fundamental goals is to make you feel at home... thus giving you the ability to change the way the desktop works, looks and behave."

This announcement comes just weeks after Linux Mint 12 was released to wide acclaim with MATE (a fork of GNOME 2) and MGSE (a user-friendly GNOME 3 extension tool). Lefebvre explained that while they were nice stopgap measures, neither addressed the real issue. Cinnamon is designed to do just that.

Cinnamon is currently available for "Linux Mint 12, Ubuntu 11.10, Fedora 16, OpenSUSE 12.1 and Arch Linux" and will soon find its way onto LMDE. "Going forward, Cinnamon will gain themes, extensions and a control center. It will likely replace Gnome Shell / MGSE as the main desktop in Linux Mint, and we will continue to support MATE (which goal and technology are different but which is also getting better and better by the day)."

LinuxBSDos.com has posted lots more screenshots and a bit of a tour.