Well, here we are with more comments on the Manjaro Cinnamon edition, a few days after install. It's a very nice modern interface. If you like the ol' school look, which I do, it can do that too. It uses modern controls, such as Adwaita, which I dislike,, except in the Dark mode which is nice. Of course, you can install a slew of other controls from places like gnome-look.org.
As I write this, Firefox is open, with three tabs, and the gnome system monitor is telling me the system is using 1.1 gigabytes of memory; not exactly a lightweight, but still a bit less than Windows 7, 8, or 8.1, which typically ran 2 to 3 hundred megabytes more.
Cinnamon is not as snappy as XFCE4, but then again, XFCE4 runs quite a bit lighter, as it is intended for older machines to run it comfortably. Cinnamon gets fairly fast updates, but poor ol' XFCE4 languishes in the update desert for almost two years before getting some serious updates.
My box has 8 Gig of memory, two 120 MB SSDs, a 3.8 GHz A10 5800K quad core AMD APU, running an integrated Radeon 7600D accelerated graphics card. Not a rubber burner, to be sure, but it's no slouch either.
Manjaro Cinnamon provides a nice clean desktop experience, with lots of useful tools. One of the things I like about the Manjaro dev team is that they've made available some really nice GUI tools for Pacman, such as Pamac and Octopi. If you wish to get those from Arch, or Evolution Linux, for example, then you'll have to take your chances and dance with the Devil, i.e., you have to get them from AUR, and it certainly isn't as easy as Manjaro makes it.
Evolution Linux, a so-called "pure Arch" derivative, which I installed and tried today, does not make the job of getting these GUI tools an easy one; but then again, this is the Arch Way, isn't it? For those who like that, more power to you; but for me... uh uh, I'll stick with good ol' Manjaro Linux. There's nothing wrong with the Arch Way, I just prefer the Manjaro Way. More on Evolution Linux in a future blog.
Final thoughts. Cinnamon is a nice desktop, I like it. It does more than XFCE, but it's not as snappy as XFCE. It's highly configurable. It's got a nice modern interface, but you can give it an ol' school look, depending on what you like. It's heavy on the resources, in my opinion, and could do with a bit of trimming and speeding up. But it's a darn nice desktop, nice to look at and fun to work with, to the credit of the Mint Team, who came up with this desktop.
Having said all that, I would opt for KDE as my favourite DE. It's a better integrated DE, in my humble opinion, looks really great and kicks ass. But that's the subject of another blog.
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