Tweaking Cinnamon
See how easy it is to make your mark on Linux Mint’s flagship desktop environment and beyond!
If you haven’t had a nosey around Cinnamon’s many settings, you might be pleasantly surprised at how configurable it is. When Mint 20 was released much ado was made about the Mint-Y theme now having fifty shades of colour variations (okay, it was 32), but we haven’t found our favourite hue yet. Check out the palette by opening up the main menu and going to Preferences then Themes.
Dark themes are so common even Windows has them (but not Google Docs– Ed) now, but Mint has a corresponding dark theme for each variation. You can download whole new themes from the web too; just don’t expect them to all be in line with your design preferences. Hidden away in the Settings section of the Themes dialog are some oft- overlooked options for scrollbars, including the option to disable overlays.
To customise the main panel, go to Preferences and then select Applets. Now you can add all kinds of shortcuts and widgets. For example, select the Expo applet and click the + at the bottom to add a shortcut (via a smooth animation) to an expo-style overview of your workspaces. For even more efficient workspace shifting (at the cost of some panel estate) add the Workspace Switcher applet. If you want to disable Expo, or any other applet, just click the – button. Like themes, third-party applets can be downloaded by visiting the appropriate tab. Downloaded themes come with no guarantees, so they come with an uninstall option in case they annoy you.
There are some extremely pleasant new wallpapers in Mint 20.2, and we recommend to right-click the desktop and choose Change Background if you haven’t already perused them. But before you click there, take a look again at that desktop context menu. In particular, have a gander at the Add Desklets option. There aren’t many pre-installed desklets, but if you want a digital clock or photo frame on your desktop then you’re in luck. If you delve into the Download tab you’ll find plenty more, including an analogue clock as well as more productive tools such as the Google Calendar desklet.
The final flavour in Cinnamon’s Spices cabinet is extensions. These change the way the whole desktop behaves. Again there aren’t many installed by default, but head to the Download tab and it won’t take long for ‘Wobbly Windows’ to catch your eye. Hopefully you have better luck than us with that particular extension. If you’re of that pedigree, you’ll remember the Desktop Cube extension too, taking your workspace switching to a whole new level. There are other extensions which some may write off as desktop fripperies, such as being able to tweak window decorations, shadows or transparency, but there’s no harm trying them out.
By default desktop effects are enabled in Cinnamon, unless your install has fallen back to software rendering – in which case have a look at the Driver Manager for possible remedies. These effects aren’t the sort of in-your-face, windows catching fire, stunts of the early ‘aughts, but have been designed to help users navigate
the desktop. It’s reassuring (sometimes) to see where applications were called into being from, and where they disappear to when they minimise. Be that as it may, you might want to turn these off, and this you can easily do by from the Effects option in the Preferences menu.
Besides eschewing the Gnome desktop, Mint has made a couple of other choices that fly in the face of desktop Ubuntu. One is the absence of the Snap daemon, which prevents installing packages from Canonical’s Snapcraft store. Another is that there’s no Wayland support (yet) in either Cinnamon, Xfce or MATE, the three officially supported Mint desktops. You might not care about next-gen, cross-distro packaging systems or banishing creaky old X.org from your machine. Indeed plenty in the Linux Mint community (looking at the forums) seem to share this sentiment. But there’s good stuff in the Snap store, so let’s look now at how we might enable that now. Plus, Wayland is pretty impressive now, so we’ll look at that over the page, once we have a desktop that supports it.
When Mint 20 was released sans Snap support, an immediate consequence was that there was no way to install the Chromium web browser, since Ubuntu (20.04 and later) now only packages it as a Snap. We think more people should use Firefox, and if our user agent tracking on linuxformat.com is anything to go by, it seems they are. But it sets a potentially worrying precedent; if Chromium was to be abandoned by Ubuntu’s DEB packagers, then perhaps other popular applications might go the same way. We don’t think you should worry, as so far there’s been no sign of that. Team Mint now packages its own Chromium DEB package, so if you’re craving a hint of Google in your browsing then fetch it from the Mint App Store or with a good ol’ fashioned apt incantation at the command line.
We’ve seen that software is also available as Flatpaks, and that this is enables a wealth of software to be installed from outside the Ubuntu (and Mint) repositories. Flatpak is actually enabled out of the box on Linux Mint, and if you look carefully you’ll find some Flatpak applications in the Software Manager. For example, if you want the latest version of GIMP, the Flatpak edition is probably the second one in the search results. You’ll also find Flatpaks of Spotify and Steam so you can queue up your Rush playlist and play Space Invaders like it’s the olde days.
If you do want Snaps, perhaps to get the latest version of Blender or the PyCharm IDE, that’s easy to sort out from the Terminal. We first remove the file that prevents the Snap daemon from being installed, and then install it with apt:
$ sudo rm /etc/apt/prefs.d/nosnap.pref $ sudo apt install snapd
Snaps can now be searched and installed from the command line. You can also browse what’s on offer at https://snapcraft.io, but for a complete GUI experience you’ll want to install the Snap Store too. Appropriately, it’s available as a Snap and it can be yours with:
$ sudo snapd install snap-store
One easy and surefire way to turn heads (or whatever is the virtual equivalent) is to bling your terminal with a little transparency. Not only does this look pleasant, but if you arrange your windows correctly, and get into the habit of arranging them as such, it can be pretty useful as well. Endowed with X-ray vision, one can make out both the terminal itself and the web browser or whatever substrata lay below this.
To enable the opulent opacity effect in the Terminal, go to Edit > Preferences then select the current profile (it will be named Unnamed Profile if you haven’t given it), untick the setting about system theme transparency, then tick the box above it. Play with the slider to find the optimum opacity. Or, if you’d rather more drastic changes look over the page, in which we install the highfidelity KDE Plasma desktop environment.
USEFUL DESKTOP EFFECTS “These effects aren’t the sort of in-your-face, windows catching fire, stunts of the early ‘aughts.”