Change desktops

One of Linux’s strengths is that you’re not tied to a single desktop. If you’ve installed Ubuntu rather than Mint you’ll find it comes with a very different desktop environment in the form of Unity. It’s still reasonably familiar to use, but you will have to make a bigger effort to master it.

If you’re struggling to acclimatise to Unity, and would rather use Mint’s Cinnamon desktop instead, then you can easily do so. First, open a Terminal window and type: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:lestcape/ cinnamon sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install cinnamon

This will add the Cinnamon repository (repos) to Ubuntu, then download and install it. Once installed, you need to click the ‘Settings’ button in the top right-hand corner of the Unity desktop and choose ‘Log out’ to return to the login screen. You’ll see a little Ubuntu icon appear next to your username – click this and a list of available desktops will appear, including Cinnamon. Select that to boot into your new desktop, complete with all the features we describe on the rest of this page. You can always switch back to Unity from the login screen.

If you subsequently outgrow the Cinnamon desktop, then you can easily switch desktops in Mint too. You can even install multiple desktops and move between them as circumstances dictate.