f you recall how users of Windows reacted to the first iteration of Windows 8, well, the reaction to GNOME 3’s GNOME Shell was worse. Very few people outside of the GNOME development community liked what they were been asked to consider. GNOME Shell was/is a radical departure from what people were used to. They said it was an interface only suitable for tablets and smartphones, not for desktop computing. Fans of GNOME 2 wanted their “start button” back worse than users of Windows 7 did theirs. As is the tradition in the Free Software community, people who didn’t like the situation and who could do something about it, did. Instead of letting GNOME 2 go, somebody forked it, renaming it MATE. The rest, as they say, is history. But that was about MATE. What about Cinnamon?
The developers of
Linux Mint, a very popular Linux distribution based on
Ubuntu Desktop were not thrilled with the idea of using Ubuntu’s Unity desktop or GNOME 3’s GNOME Shell. But they also wanted something that was current, which meant that MATE was not good enough. So they decided to create their own desktop environment, one that retains the same look and feel of a GNOME 2 (or MATE) desktop, but built atop GNOME 3 technologies. That was how Cinnamon came to be.