Installing Cinnamon in Ubuntu 20.04

After the introduction of Gnome 3.0, the imminent arrival of Cinnamon was announced, with the goal of keeping the more familiar old Gnome 2.0 interface. But unlike MATE, Cinnamon is based on and utilizes the new Gnome 3 technologies. Over time, however, Cinnamon has evolved into a fully functional desktop environment. This is how the developer managed to make the appearance of Gnome 2.0 more familiar and recognizable to Windows users. The panel is located at the bottom of the screen and it has a main menu button that opens the main menu, which is virtually identical to the Windows main menu. With this in mind, let's look at installing Cinnamon in Ubuntu 20.04.

Features of Cinnamon

Before looking at the very instructions for installing Cinnamon in Ubuntu 20.04, it would not be superfluous to familiarize yourself with the main distinguishing features of this functional desktop environment:

• Cinnamon is more flexible in customization than Gnome, you can customize various parameters of the environment's operation;
• Nemo is used as a file manager. It's another fork of Nautilus with better integration into that shell;
• desklets are very similar to Windows gadgets, they allow you to monitor CPU load, weather and other useful things;
• a panel with the main menu, window list and system tray similar to the same panel in Windows.

As for the minimum system requirements, at least the processor frequency should be 1 GHz and RAM should be at least 512 MB.

Installing Cinnamon in Ubuntu 20.04

Performing the installation is pretty simple. It is available in the official repositories, so there will be no difficulties with this. Before installing the shell, update all the packages on the system:

$ sudo apt update

$ sudo apt full-upgrade

To install Cinnamon in Ubuntu you need to execute

$ sudo apt install cinnamon-desktop-environment

Now you need to wait for the installation to complete and reboot your personal computer. After rebooting, select the current session by clicking on the special gear.

Screenshot of the installed system:

Customizing Cinnamon

Since the installation of Cinnamon in Ubuntu in completed, you can move on to consider customization. Numix themes work best and can be installed from the official repositories:

$ sudo apt install numix-gtk-theme

The user also still has the option to use Linux Mint themes, including Mint Y. However, the packages need to be downloaded and installed from deb packages manually. In addition, the libreoffice-style-mint package will also need to be installed for mint-themes. To install the downloaded deb files, follow the steps below:

$ sudo dpkg -i ~/Загрузки/*.deb

How to uninstall Cinnamon

If you have installed, customized, but have not enjoyed the functionality of Cinnamon, you need to run the following commands:

$ sudo apt purge purge cinnamon*

$ sudo apt autoremove

By running these commands, you will remove all installed packages along with the Cinnamon shell, so your system will be completely clean.