Linux Mint has apparently decided to fork Gnome Shell with a new project called “Cinnamon”.

Mint released Mint 11 “Katya” with its own customized Gnome-Shell, foregoing using the recently released Gnome 3 or Ubuntu’s Unity. The Gnome-Shell extensions, aptly called “Mint GNOME Shell Extensions (MGSE),” keep much of the older, more common Gnome functionality with notifications, window behavior and panel positioning, but as an extension instead of a GUI it lacks control between interactions that you’d see in a full-fledged user interface. For that reason coupled with the want to not fix something that isn’t broken, Mint is going its own way with Cinnamon.

The whole project is open source on GitHub, and the rumor is that it will be built in-line with Gnome 3, incorporating changes as they come but keeping the old look and feel of the Gnome 2 environment adding in advanced feature sets and hardware optimizations to keep the GUI cutting edge.

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Linux Mint has apparently decided to fork Gnome Shell with a new project called "Cinnamon". Mint released Mint 11 “Katya” with its own customized Gnome-Shell, foregoing using the recently released Gnome 3 or Ubuntu’s Unity. The Gnome-Shell extensions, aptly called “Mint GNOME Shell Extensions (MGSE),” keep much of the older, more common Gnome functionality with ...