Linux Mint Forums

I was using Arch Linux with Cinnamon until recently when it was said that Arch will be dropping Cinnamon from the repositories, where I switched to KDE. I've always been a fan of Cinnamon and I see it as the best DE.

But for how long will Cinnamon stay in the official Arch repositories? It only just "survived" this time, but will it get dropped next time?

Moved here as about Arch. AFAIK the problem was Arch got (of course ) a much newer version of GNOME than as available on Ubuntu or Debian. Cinnamon, just like GNOME Shell and Unity (for now; it will switch to Qt), runs on top of GNOME. New versions of GNOME may break stuff and are perhaps not fully backwards compatible--meaning programs such as Cinnamon need patches done by their developers to make it work again as intended with the new GNOME version. That was an issue for Arch, as they only keep the newest versions of programs in their repository so only the new version of GNOME that Cinnamon hadn't been patched for yet.

Cinnamon was patched by the Linux Mint developers and a version was made available that works on Arch. Timetables are different though; Arch needed compatibility with newest GNOME release "yesterday", while for Linux Mint this new GNOME version won't be used until Linux Mint 16 (October)--hence there is no urgency at Linux Mint, but there is on Arch. There were more important issues in Cinnamon for Linux Mint, as work was ongoing for Cinnamon 1.8 to be included in Linux Mint 15.

It is a "make it happen" issue; somebody needs to make it happen that Cinnamon is patched to be compatible again with new GNOME versions (as GNOME releases continue to not be backwards compatible and so keep breaking stuff). Cinnamon is open source, so anybody can step up and "make it happen".

I am a bit surprised. Backwards compatibility is one of the most important things there is - if not THE most important things.

Of course you will lose your entire user base if you break stuff with each new release.

First of all, xenopeek is speaky about "forward" compatibility. I mean, Arch has always a newer version of Gnome than Debian. So Arch will always have a newer version of Gnome than Linux Mint. And this kind of compatibility cannot be requested to the Linux Mint team. That's not there business.

Second thing, backward compatibility is not automatic. Cinnamon 2.2 is not compatible with Linux Mint 13. That's a choice and a clever one in my opinion. It has saved time and allowed them to focus on the dev of new features.