Linux Mint 13 Gets Back to Desktop Basics - Computerworld

IDG News Service - Bucking the trend of increasingly experimental desktop interfaces, the developers behind the Linux Mint are adopting a simpler desktop for the next version of the open-source Linux distribution.

Linux Mint 13 will feature an entirely new user interface, called Cinnamon. Earlier this week, the Linux Mint developers released a version of the shell. Previous editions of Linux Mint used a standard version of the Gnome environment.

"We're hoping [Cinnamon] will seduce most Linux Mint users, whether they're coming from Gnome 2, Gnome Shell or other desktops," said Linux Mint creator and lead developer Clement Lefebvre.

In a world where the interfaces of desktop operating systems are increasingly streamlined, Cinnamon appears to be quite a conservative design, not surprising given the goals of the Linux Mint project.

Lefebvre first crafted Linux Mint after reviewing other Linux distributions for various online forums. From this work, Lefebvre developed ideas about what features should be in the ideal distribution. He designed Linux Mint specifically for people who want a desktop OS that is easy to use and requires little maintenance.

"We expect much more from our desktop than other distributions. We look at common use cases and if they fail to work out of the box or if they're too complicated for the user, we identify it as a problem that needs fixing," he said.

Last year, Canonical announced it was changing the Ubuntu desktop from Gnome to the Unity interface, citing issues such as unnecessary features. Unity is shell, or overlay, for version 3 of Gnome, one that streamlined the interface so it could be used across more form factors. Canonical plans to advance its user interface even more with the next release of Ubuntu, with a new technology called Head-Up Display that will ultimately do away with application menus altogether.

While Canonical is rushing into the future with its new interfaces, Linux Mint remains steadfastly devoted to the traditional desktop. "Microsoft Windows and Apple Mac OS dominate the desktop market with inferior products. There's a huge potential for growth for Linux on the desktop market," Lefebvre said. "Our core expertise is on the desktop, we're not interested in smartphones, tablets and mobile devices."

Given that Linux Mint is based on the Ubuntu distribution (which is, itself, based on Debian Linux), it might seem that Linux Mint would use Unity as well. This is not the case, however. "So far Unity is only used by one other distribution. It doesn't look particularly interesting to us and there's no demand for it," Lefebvre said.

Nor does the Linux Mint team want to continue to use Gnome 3, which was released last August and was used in Linux Mint 12. Gnome 3 asks people to change the way they use their computers, Lefebvre noted in a blog post last November. It requires users to think about using the computer in terms of the applications they want to use rather than tasks they want to complete. Nor does it multitask well, he charged. Lefebvre was not alone in his frustration: Linux maintainer Linus Torvalds has called Gnome 3 "an unholy mess."

Customising Gnome Shell

As presented in this post, I've been using gnome-shell in Ubuntu for the past two months now. And as explained in that post already, I love the way how things fall in place in the shell as compared to unity where things are a bit... dull for me. But lets not go into that discussion now.

One great thing about any Linux distribution is how easy it's to customise to your liking. It's addictive and I do it so much, I even have a name for the whole process. Pimping my [insert distro name here]. It's a great way to waste time and learn more about the OS. There are so many ways to do that, changing the desktop environment, changing the theme, changing the arrangement of the different components, having a compiz effect, different icon theme, that list is endless. Or it used to be in Gnome 2.

How it was in Gnome 2

With Gnome 3, things changed. No longer is it so easy for am amateur user to change stuff the way he/she likes. Gnome 3 has two shell's, so to speak. One is Unity, Ubuntu's very own shell built on top of Gnome 2 and then on top of Gnome 3 when that came out. The other is Gnome's very own shell, gnome-shell, which I use. While the shell has been very easy for me to use (sometimes I think the gnome-shell had been made for my use only), its not without its criticism in the Linux community. Indeed, recent polls in Ubuntu community site 'OMG! Ubuntu' shows that Unity is ahead in usage.

I, too, had some problems with the way things were. One of the most important problem is the same problem with Unity, customization. For a long time, customising anything in shell required adding third party PPA's, something that the paranoid side of me just doesn't want to cope with, despite the adventurous side of me still hedging me on. But before I finally gave away to my urges, this site came out.

Provided that you have Firefox, then for now, this is the way to go about customizing gnome-shell. It's as easy as it gets, find the customisation that suits you, click, install, done (if everything went well). While having such a preset of customisations available may not be the full fledged pimping some of the hardcore pimpers have in mind, I do get a sense of 'my own shell' now. Since the site is in alpha stage, I imagine they'll improve the look and feel of the site to something more desirable and easy, with filters. Right now, I just open firefox once everyday (I use chromium by default and that particular site needs firefox) and go through the list of available extensions. When it started, it had four pages of extensions, but now that list has grown to eight. I imagine this will be a huge list one day since there is an option for user submitted extensions. It would be neat if there aren't extensions that do the same thing.

Here is a comparision of what my desktop used to look like and what it looks like now.

Gnome-shell before

Gnome-shell now

Here is the list of extensions I have installed and provided you are reading this in firefox and have gnome-shell, you can also mimick the style.

Alternative Status Menu One of the thing that bothered me the most when I switched from unity to shell was that the status menu (the one with your name) had no option to shutdown the system. Annoyingly I had to logout (the option available in place of shutting down) and then shutdown from the login screen. This extension fixed that problem

Frippery Move ClockThe clock at the center of the taskbar wasn't working for me so well. I always keep checking the right of the taskbar and then realise it's at the center. This moved the clock to the right, where I expect to see it.

noally
The accessibility icon on the indicator menu is quite useful, but not for me. I've no need for it and it had to go.

Overlay Icons
Going into dash and you see all the windows that you have open. But... distinguishing what is what takes sometime. If only there were some icons on those windows.... done!

Places Status Indicator
I dont want to open the dock everytime I want to open a specific folder. This places a folder icon on your indicator bar that shows a drop down of all your nautilus bookmarks and external hard disks.

Status only icon
I feel my name is quite long and filling up a lot of space on the taskbar. Had to let you go buddy, despite thinking that having my name on the desktop is very close to a personal thing between me and my shell.

Window Icon List
To summarise... docbarX look alike.


The changes I made are very subtle, but there are a lot more that can be done. Like you could add a start menu (which I thought was a feature that I would never see), have quick lists like in Unity and so much more. As for me, I liked the way gnome-shell already looked by default, albeit a few required changes, but having gnome-shell look like gnome-classic (which can be done to a decent amount of accuracy as shown in this article) certainly shows off the power of the shell, but not something I would be doing (at least any time soon).