Can I use Cinnamon UI on Xfce?

[FatDroid]

I had a Chromebook running Mint Cinnamon, and I really liked the UI and how it all felt. I sold it at the end of last week as it was having 900 billion issues on a wide range of distros, in the end it turned out to be certain hardware that's apparently very unreliable on Linux, multiple people on a few different forums spent a fair bit of time trying to get it up and running properly but it was having none of it.

Im still using my 2 old laptops with Linux, both are 13 years old and both run perfectly. *2019 Chromebook couldn't handle it, that's my advert for Chromebooks.
Both of these old laptops are pretty low spec so I've installed Mint as its my preferred distro, and Xfce as it's the most lightweight flavour of said distros. Ideally, I'd like to be able to run the Cinnamon looking desktop environment as a preference for how it looks, is this at all possible?

 

[kc1di]

Give us the specs of the machines in question.
Go to the terminal and type this command and post the results back here.

inxi -Fxxzr

The problem with running cinnamon on a low spec machine is It's based on gnome and as such will use much more especially video and ram. You can try it on a live stick first see how it goes. In Mint I do not recommend installing Cinnamon alongside XFCE or Mate on the same machine but do a fresh install of the Cinnamon version. Though technically you can install Cinnamon from Synaptic and choose it at the login window. Good luck whatever you choose to do.

 

[FatDroid]

Give us the specs of the machines in question.
Go to the terminal and type this command and post the results back here.

inxi -Fxxzr

The problem with running cinnamon on a low spec machine is It's based on gnome and as such will use much more especially video and ram. You can try it on a live stick first see how it goes. In Mint I do not recommend installing Cinnamon alongside XFCE or Mate on the same machine but do a fresh install of the Cinnamon version. Though technically you can install Cinnamon from Synaptic and choose it at the login window. Good luck whatever you choose to do.

dale@Satellite:~$ inxi -Fxxzr
System:
Kernel: 5.19.0-41-generic x86_64 bits: 64 compiler: N/A
Desktop: Xfce 4.16.0 tk: Gtk 3.24.23 wm: xfwm dm: LightDM
Distro: Linux Mint 21.1 Vera base: Ubuntu 22.04 jammy
Machine:
Type: Laptop System: TOSHIBA product: Satellite C660 v: PSC0LE-04701LEN
serial: <superuser required> Chassis: type: 10 serial: <superuser required>
Mobo: TOSHIBA model: PWWAM v: 1.00 serial: <superuser required>
BIOS: TOSHIBA v: 1.60 date: 07/07/2011
Battery:
ID-1: BAT1 charge: 15.2 Wh (33.5%) condition: 45.4/47.5 Wh (95.5%)
volts: 11.5 min: 10.8 model: TOSHIBA PA3817U-1BRS serial: <filter>
status: Charging
CPU:
Info: dual core model: Celeron T3500 bits: 64 type: MCP
arch: Core Yorkfield rev: A cache: L1: 128 KiB L2: 1024 KiB
Speed (MHz): avg: 2095 min/max: N/A cores: 1: 2095 2: 2095 bogomips: 8379
Flags: ht lm nx pae sse sse2 sse3 ssse3
Graphics:
Device-1: Intel Mobile 4 Series Integrated Graphics vendor: Toshiba
driver: i915 v: kernel ports: active: LVDS-1 empty: DP-1,SVIDEO-1,VGA-1
bus-ID: 00:02.0 chip-ID: 8086:2a42
Device-2: Chicony CNF9055 Toshiba Webcam type: USB driver: uvcvideo
bus-ID: 1-6:3 chip-ID: 04f2:b1d6
Display: x11 server: X.Org v: 1.21.1.4 compositor: xfwm v: 4.16.1 driver:
X: loaded: modesetting unloaded: fbdev,vesa gpu: i915 display-ID: :0.0
screens: 1
Screen-1: 0 s-res: 1366x768 s-dpi: 96
Monitor-1: LVDS-1 model: Seiko Epson res: 1366x768 dpi: 101
diag: 394mm (15.5")
OpenGL: renderer: Mesa Mobile Intel GM45 Express (CTG) v: 2.1 Mesa 22.2.5
direct render: Yes
Audio:
Device-1: Intel 82801I HD Audio vendor: Toshiba driver: snd_hda_intel
v: kernel bus-ID: 00:1b.0 chip-ID: 8086:293e
Sound Server-1: ALSA v: k5.19.0-41-generic running: yes
Sound Server-2: PulseAudio v: 15.99.1 running: yes
Sound Server-3: PipeWire v: 0.3.48 running: yes
Network:
Device-1: Realtek RTL810xE PCI Express Fast Ethernet vendor: Toshiba
driver: r8169 v: kernel pcie: speed: 2.5 GT/s lanes: 1 port: 3000
bus-ID: 0e:00.0 chip-ID: 10ec:8136
IF: enp14s0 state: down mac: <filter>
Device-2: Realtek RTL8188CE 802.11b/g/n WiFi Adapter driver: rtl8192ce
v: kernel pcie: speed: 2.5 GT/s lanes: 1 port: 4000 bus-ID: 14:00.0
chip-ID: 10ec:8176
IF: wlp20s0 state: up mac: <filter>
Drives:
Local Storage: total: 298.09 GiB used: 16.34 GiB (5.5%)
ID-1: /dev/sda vendor: Hitachi model: HTS543232A7A384 size: 298.09 GiB
speed: 3.0 Gb/s serial: <filter>
Partition:
ID-1: / size: 291.85 GiB used: 16.33 GiB (5.6%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/sda3
ID-2: /boot/efi size: 512 MiB used: 6.1 MiB (1.2%) fs: vfat
dev: /dev/sda2
Swap:
ID-1: swap-1 type: file size: 2 GiB used: 57.1 MiB (2.8%) priority: -2
file: /swapfile
Sensors:
System Temperatures: cpu: 37.0 C mobo: N/A
Fan Speeds (RPM): N/A
Repos:
Packages: 2353 apt: 2345 flatpak: 8
No active apt repos in: /etc/apt/sources.list
Active apt repos in: /etc/apt/sources.list.d/official-package-repositories.list
1: deb https://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/packages.linuxmint.com/packages vera main upstream import backport
2: deb http://mirror.bytemark.co.uk/ubuntu jammy main restricted universe multiverse
3: deb http://mirror.bytemark.co.uk/ubuntu jammy-updates main restricted universe multiverse
4: deb http://mirror.bytemark.co.uk/ubuntu jammy-backports main restricted universe multiverse
5: deb http://security.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ jammy-security main restricted universe multiverse
Info:
Processes: 210 Uptime: 3h 42m Memory: 2.78 GiB used: 1.24 GiB (44.5%)
Init: systemd v: 249 runlevel: 5 Compilers: gcc: 11.3.0 alt: 11/12
Shell: Bash v: 5.1.16 running-in: xfce4-terminal inxi: 3.3.13


Ignore the hard drive & the weird ram amount, in the next few days I'll be buying an SSD for it and as soon as I can find the right speed ram for this model Ill be running more of that too. Unrelated too, but why can I not have a capital letter for my name on Linux? Its a little thing, but it bugs me.

 

[kc1di]

If you can get the ssd and at least 4gb ram you should be good to go with cinnamon. Again I recommend a fresh new install less problems that way.

 

[FatDroid]

I got the SSD, that was job number one for today. As for the ram I may need to do some shopping around for that as the speed I need seems like rocking horse s**t. When it comes to choosing whether to stay with Xfce or Cinnamon that will indeed be a fresh install, thanks for confirming I should be good with Cinnamon

 

[Tolkem]

I'd like to be able to run the Cinnamon looking desktop environment as a preference for how it looks, is this at all possible?

If I understand correctly, looks like you want XFCE to look and function like Cinnamon, am I right? Getting XFCE to "look like Cinnamon" is probably not that difficult, functionality, now that's a different story, and I think not, it's not possible. Why? Well, both use different things, like (and most importantly) the window manager. Cinnamon uses muffin, whereas XFCE4 uses xfwm4, and they behave different, have different features and capabilities. For instance, Cinnamon supports desktop animations, XFCE4 does not. You could try installing muffin and use it with XFCE4, see how that goes and let us know
Read here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinnamon_(desktop_environment)
And here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xfce

Hope this helps!