Linux Mint Forums

To sum it up: I love 2D desktops. I never felt the need of having anything 3D there. (Sidenote: I do like the expose plugin, but it always bugs out and almost gives me a damned epileptic seizure. Seriously.)

Back to the topic. Unity is totally dependent on 3D. I tried to play around with ccsm, but it's something like you have but you shuoldn't fiddle with.
Cinnamon got the settings application. If I open it, I can disable the effects (which I, of course did).

But the menus still appear with that transition... and there is still an expo effect at the corners and what not.
Can you "water it down" to be totally 2D?

if you log out back to the log in screen you can click on sessions and select "Cinnamon 2D" from the menu, not sure how much that will help, but ive seen the option at the log in screen.

Found it, and I guess you are right. This looks like a total 2D powered desktop. (But now, the menus are drawn slowly, sluggish.) Guess it's some sort of trade-off.

You other option is to rather install Linuxmint Mate. Mate runs WAY faster than cinnamon. Its got a bit of a plain look ( kinda like a mixture between windows 2000 and Windows XP ) but the speed is noticably faster. and if the look gets to plain you can always install Compiz which then enables all the 3D effects on Mate and even with compiz it still runs faster than Cinnamon.

Or if you want you can install Mate Desktop Enviroment ontop of Cinnamon, however it will be the default Mate, not the same mate that linuxmint supplies with their DVD ( there is a big difference between the two ). the default one is quite ugly, the mint one has a nice start menu, the default one doesnt. to install Mate on top of Cinnamon do this :

1. Click the Menu button.
2. Click the Administration button.
3. Click the Synaptic Package Manager button to start Synaptic.
4. Do a search for “mate desktop” without the quotes.
5. You’ll see a list of packages that can be installed, select the mate-desktop-environment package.
6. Click the Apply button to install your packages.
7. Log out of your Linux Mint 13 Cinnamon session.
8. Click the session icon on the login screen.
9. Click the MATE option.
10. Click the Change Session button.
11. Type in your user ID and password to login.
12. A menu will pop up giving you the option to use MATE as the default desktop, or to use it just for this session.
13. Your MATE desktop will load. You can go back to Cinnamon by choosing it on the session menu on the login screen.