Cinnamon: Linux Mint’s next GNOME step

The Linux Mint developers, led by founder Clement Lefebvre, have forked the shell of GNOME 3. The new shell fork, named Cinnamon, is being used as a platform to continue their development of a more GNOME 2-like environment for GNOME 3 users. In Linux Mint 12, the developers introduced MGSE (Mint GNOME Shell Extensions), a set of shell extensions which added in the various elements of functionality that the Mint team wanted to see in GNOME 3. This included a launcher menu at the bottom right, a task bar at the bottom and status widgets.

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