Use Cinnamon 3.0 on Ubuntu 16.04

Cinnamon is a Linux desktop environment based on GTK+ 3. It was started as a fork of the GNOME Shell in 2011, but became its own desktop environment in Cinnamon 2.0.

Cinnamon doesn’t come with Ubuntu by default, nor found in any other Ubuntu-based distributions by the time this article is written. The only way is to manually install Cinnamon after Ubuntu is loaded.

Installation

In order to install Cinnamon, you should add embrosyn’s Cinnamon PPA (for Ubuntu 16.04 and 15.10) first:

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:embrosyn/cinnamon

Then update sources and install:

$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install cinnamon

Once installed, log out and select Cinnamon from the login screen.

Tweaks

When selecting “Quit” from the main menu or “Power Off” from the user dropdown in the system tray, you won’t see any buttons other than “Cancel”.

To fix this, open “dconf Editor” and go to org > cinnamon > desktop > session, make sure session-manager-uses-logind and settings-daemon-uses-logind are both checked. Then logout or restart the system, you will see the buttons are back.

Uninstallation

$ sudo apt-get purge cinnamon
$ sudo apt-get autoremove