Norbert Preining: Future of Cinnamon in Debian

Tolkem

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Hi everyone! Hope you're all having a nice life! :)
While checking my feed, just bumped into this https://www.preining.info/blog/?p=12001
After Bullseye, the future of Cinnamon in Debian currently looks bleak.
Norbert Preining, who seems to be Debian's Cinnamon maintainer, announced he might not be maintaining it anymore due to the fact that he no longer uses it since he switched to KDE Plasma
Since my switch to KDE/Plasma, I haven’t used Cinnamon in months. Only occasionally I tested new releases, but never gave them a real-world test. Having left Gnome3 for it’s complete lack of usability for pro-users, I escaped to Cinnamon and found a good home there for quite some time – using modern technology but keeping user interface changes conservative. For long time I haven’t even contemplated using KDE, having been burned during the bad days of KDE3/4 when bloat-as-bloat-can-be was the best description.
What revelation it was that KDE/Plasma was more lightweight, faster, responsive, integrated, customizable, all in all simple great. Since my switch to KDE/Plasma I think not for a second I have missed anything from the Gnome3 or Cinnamon world.

And that means, I will most probably NOT packaging Cinnamon 5, nor do any real packaging work of Cinnamon for Debian in the future. Of course, I will try to keep maintenance of the current set of packages for Bullseye, but for the next release, I think it is time that someone new steps in. Cinnamon packaging taught me a lot on how to deal with multiple related packages, which is of great use in the KDE packaging world.

If someone steps forward, I will surely be around for support and help, but as long as nobody takes the banner, it will mean the end of Cinnamon in Debian.

Please contact me if you are interested!
Preining has a repo with latest KDE 5.22(Debian Testing/Unstable only) https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/npreining:/debian-kde:/ I've been using this to keep my Plasma updated in Bullseye. :)
 


I used to use Cinnamon but I switched to i3wm about a year ago.
 
Cinnamon desktop is OK if like the eye candy and bells and whistles.

Us simple folk are happy with a simple DE / WM without all of the eye candy and bells and whistles.
 
Cinnamon desktop is OK if like the eye candy and bells and whistles.

Us simple folk are happy with a simple DE / WM without all of the eye candy and bells and whistles.
It isn't always about the "all of the eye candy and bells and whistles", but what the DE has to offer, for instance, I find Cinnamon a bit "short" on features for me, while KDE has them(almost)all. You can have KDE with no effects at all, it's up to you. I personally disable most of the desktop effects as the one thing I'm interested the most is how much I can do with the keyboard, and with KDE I can do pretty much everything that I can not do in most DEs I've tried. IMHO, what makes a good DE is the WM that does most of the job under the hood, and KDE has, if not the very best, one of the best; Kwin. I can spend the whole day without touching the mouse, not even once(ok, maybe once or twice)! Kwin lets you do whatever you want with your windows, effortlessly, within a few clicks. Kwin supports compositing via opengl directly, and you can even choose what version to use, in kwin section in system settings. It supports wayland too, though there's still work to do, specially when it comes to attaching an external monitor, and 5.22 is almost there. Kwin has this https://userbase.kde.org/KWin_Rules and it rules! :) I tried KDE 3 and 4, didn't like them, too heavy. I was an XFCE user for a very long time in my Arch's days, but once I started using more and more the keyboard to control the system, and less and less the mouse, XFCE started to feel "short", I then learned about awesome-wm, and for a time used a xfce+awesome combo. When the news about new Plasma 5 being lightweight hit the internet, I gave it a try, 350mb on idle! I didn't switch immediately as I was very used to my workflow with xfce+awesome, but set up a second system(Q4OS)to use Plasma, and the more I used it, the more I liked it, so I eventually installed KDE in Arch, unfortunately one day the HDD died, and I felt too lazy to reinstall Arch and spend the time to make it the way it was again, so when I got a new HDD, installed Q4OS and been using it for the past 2-3 years without mayor issues; it's a great distro. :) So yeah, while KDE has "all of the eye candy and bells and whistles(and you can choose not to have any)", it's a great DE that should not be judged based only on that "it has nice effects", which it does, but it also is so much more than that.
 
i (currently) am using Cinnamon on Vanilla Arch - i'm fairly sharp eyed but so far the bells and whistles have escaped me . I choose cinnamon at the greeter login. I also have xfce installed and that gives me access to xfce terminal. Also have gnome installed don't like ; i guess will have a look at KDE Arch wiki says KDE currently plasma , collection of libs ...

If i was to go off topic , i would ask didn't you get cold turkey from not having access to pacman anymore on Debian based OS ?

On Slackware i did note that the inclusion of KDE did give access to a lot of extras such as kate etc
 
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i would ask didn't you get cold turkey from not having access to pacman anymore on Debian based OS ?
Not as much I used to, but yeah, pacman's one of the best pkg managers I've ever used. I have archbang installed in a VM, sometimes I launch it and play a bit with it :) That being said, apt has improved a lot, and is pretty fast these days too, at least in Debian it is.
On Slackware i did note that the inclusion of KDE did give access to a lot of extras such as kate etc
You don't need KDE to use Kate https://binary-factory.kde.org/job/Kate_Release_appimage/
 
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