Cinnamon: GNOME Shell

I'm not going to argue whether Gnome Shell is a good or a bad desktop. It's just not what we're looking for. The user experience the Gnome team is trying to create isn't the one we're interested in providing to our users. There are core features and components we absolutely need, and because they're not there in Gnome Shell, we had to add them using extensions with MGSE. The extension system in Gnome Shell is handy but core parts of a desktop need to be able to communicate with each others and be integrated properly. The Gnome development team is not interested in the features we implemented, it's opposed to adding them to Gnome Shell, and it doesn't share our vision of a desktop. In other words, our work on Gnome 3 does not influence the development of Gnome Shell, Gnome Shell isn't going in a direction that is suitable for us, and we're not interested in shipping Gnome Shell "as is", or in continuing with multiple hacks and extensions.

MATE is different. It just needs time to mature but it provides what most of our Gnome 2 users want. We're currently working on releasing version 1.2.0 (which unstable release is in testing at the moment). I personally have high hopes for MATE and whatever we do with Cinnamon, it's comforting people still have the choice to run what is now coming really close to what Gnome 2 was.

Cinnamon is ALPHA but it starts with a stable fork of Gnome Shell 3.2.1 and the features present in MGSE. It works well and it's already a better implementation of what we want from a desktop than Gnome Shell and MGSE. Its aim isn't to reproduce exactly Gnome 2, like MATE does, but to innovate and do something new... By new, I don't mean new paradigms. There's a new generation of desktops out there, including Gnome Shell and Unity. These desktops are shiny, they look good and they're slowly gaining popularity. They're based on new and exciting technologies but they also come with a cost... they're re-inventing the way we use our computer. It's neither right or wrong of course, but it will only appeal to a certain category of users.. and there are a lot of people out there, myself included, who aren't convinced the traditional desktops were bad and who are concerned about not having a choice as more and more people switch towards these new technologies. With Cinnamon we're jumping on these new technologies and we're able to provide something that looks as modern as Unity and Shell, without reinventing the wheel when it comes to user experience. As a distribution we're also guaranteeing we can provide a desktop which implements the vision we have for Linux Mint. And finally, we can add much more many features, integrate our own technology into the desktop itself and do all of this cleanly as opposed to using patches and hacks.

If I had to summarize all of this, I'd simply tell you: We pick the best components for our releases, but if we don't find what we're looking for, we get involved. Gnome Shell isn't what we want and we can't change it to our liking. The one thing we want for Linux Mint 13 is a desktop people can use and say "this is better than Gnome 2". It's ambitious, we made the first steps with MGSE, but more work is needed and we won't achieve this goal simply by writing extensions.