Cinnamon and Razor-qt: A tale of alternative desktops

Despite how often we hear about "the post-PC era," the Linux desktop environment is certainly an active space, churning with more competing projects than ever. Two recent additions to that space are Cinnamon and Razor-qt, which could be described as "alternative DEs" breaking away from the more established GNOME and KDE offerings, respectively. The relationships between the projects are not quite that simple, however, as Cinnamon has plans for retaining GNOME compatibility, while Razor-qt is more interested in producing a lightweight, stripped-down environment.

Cinnamon

Cinnamon is the brainchild of Linux Mint's Clement Lefebvre. The Mint distribution is derived from Ubuntu, but it has set the goal for itself of supporting multiple DEs in parallel. In November 2011, Lefebvre blogged about the upcoming release of Mint 12 and outlined two alternatives that Mint users could expect to see in place of the GNOME Shell environment. One was MATE, a third-party revival of the GNOME 2.x desktop. MATE was started by an Arch Linux developer, but Lefebvre serves as the project's release manager.

The second alternative was the Mint GNOME Shell Extensions (MGSE), which as the name makes clear is a suite of extensions for GNOME 3.2's GNOME Shell. Individually the extensions implement several desktop conventions not available in vanilla GNOME Shell (such as a bottom panel, a window list, and an "applications menu"), and alter some individual pieces of GNOME Shell's behavior, such as window switching.

Although using MGSE restores multiple desktop components that GNOME Shell's critics said they missed from GNOME 2.x, it remains GNOME Shell underneath. In late December 2011, Lefebvre unveiled Cinnamon, which takes the MGSE concept further by replacing GNOME Shell outright. The latest release of Cinnamon is version 1.1.3, from January 2. At the moment the code is officially available as 32- or 64-bit Debian packages (in addition to source hosted at the Linux Mint GitHub site), while third-party RPM packages have been contributed for openSUSE and Fedora.

1.1.3 picks up where MGSE left off, not only providing the bottom panel, applications menu, and window list features, but beginning the process of removing GNOME Shell components that the project considers unsatisfactory. The GNOME Shell "Applications View," which is the search-based interface to a system's installed applications, is the first to go. The Applications View is one of the two overlay modes triggered by activating GNOME Shell's "Activities" screen; since Cinnamon provides menu-driven access to applications, the Applications View is redundant.

On the other hand, at present Cinnamon retains the Activities screen's other mode, the "Windows" switcher, although it makes several alterations. The tab key cycles between individual windows rather than applications (which only results in different behavior for multi-window applications), and each window is stamped with its application icon. Cinnamon also adds a "Themes" overlay mode to the Activities screen, which allows the user to switch between any Cinnamon themes stored in ~/.themes. However, the entire Activities screen can be disabled by editing a dconf key.

The bottom panel is similar to GNOME 2.x's, though it uses GNOME 3 technology to provide easier right-click editing of launchers (such as the "Add to panel" option found in GNOME Shell). The applications menu, though, is a departure from upstream GNOME 2.x, and reflects the customized, multi-column main menu offered by earlier Mint releases. There are also a number of smaller changes, such as tweaks to the placement and duration of notification messages, a smaller default font size, and miscellaneous changes to the behavior of some default panel applets. Cinnamon supports multi-monitor setups, but like GNOME Shell, it has some kinks to be worked out (as users are reporting on the Mint forum).

The rationale stated for developing Cinnamon includes a number of factors: making the computer "work for you", making things "not hidden away but easy to access", and making you "feel at home ... thus giving you the ability to change the way the desktop works, looks and behave." Of course, several of those factors are uniquely personal, so it is hard to quantify what they mean in a general sense. As a result, the other way most people describe Cinnamon is that it re-implements the GNOME 2.x desktop using GNOME 3 technology. When you consider the changes to the applications menu and panel applets, that is not quite true — in fact, what Cinnamon re-implements is Mint's customized version of GNOME 2.x. If you are an Ubuntu or Fedora user, you may find that it requires some getting used to.

A bigger problem is that since the release of GNOME 3.2, a lot of GNOME Shell extensions have starting popping up, as has an "official" extensions web site. But as of today, Cinnamon is not compatible with other GNOME Shell extensions, which is probably not too surprising. A developer on the forum cites Lefebvre as saying he wants to make Cinnamon configurable without the need for extensions; nevertheless there are users who are clearly interested in using add-ons that originate elsewhere. That lack could hurt Cinnamon's adoption among non-Mint users. Another risk is what Jonathan Corbet described in his predictions for 2012: between MATE, MGSE, and Cinnamon, Linux Mint is taking on a lot of development work for a small distribution — it may fare well, but it may also hit the wall.

Razor-qt

While Cinnamon is only attempting to replace GNOME Shell (leaving other GNOME platform components untouched), Razor-qt is an attempt to build a new DE entirely, providing a lightweight computing environment based on the Qt framework. In that sense, Razor-qt is analogous to Xfce or LXDE, which build on GTK+ but do not use most GNOME platform technologies. Razor-qt provides a basic DE without depending on KDE libraries — most notably the Plasma engine on which KDE's desktop, panel, and widget system are based.

Razor-qt was started in 2010, but development picked up after the project migrated from SourceForge to Github in July 2011. The latest release is version 0.4, which dropped on December 12. In addition to the sources available through Github, there are package repositories provided for Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSUSE, Arch Linux, and Agilia, along with ebuilds for Gentoo. The dependencies are few, including Qt4 (no more specific notes as to which version), X, libudev, and libmagick.

The Razor-qt environment is lightweight, perhaps even spartan, but slick. It provides a panel (configurable for either top or bottom placement), a system menu, and a collection of essential panel applets (clock, window list, system tray, etc.). It does not include a window manager, but it is capable of cooperating with "any modern WM from fwwm2 to KWin" — although the project developers recommend Openbox. The project also recommends an assortment of Qt-based applications to flesh out the system, all of which also come without KDE dependencies.

At first launch, Razor-qt asks the user which window manager to use. Razor-qt relies on other components for things like drawing the desktop background and desktop icons, so some of the desktop look will depend on which window and file managers are being used. If GTK+ options are chosen, those tools may not quite match the Qt look-and-feel of the rest of the environment. The 0.4 release advertises its support for Freedesktop.org's "XDG" cross-desktop standards (which it implements in a reusable qtxdg library). It seems to observe the XDG base directory, menu, cursor theme, icon theme, and .desktop launcher specifications — through the window manager it also picks up support for other useful specifications, such as drag-and-drop.

The result is a desktop environment that is more-or-less usable for everyday tasks, although there are still missing and incomplete features. For example, there is a screensaver plug-in, but it only supports locking the screen by clicking on a panel button; there is no automatic time-out. Settings are divided up between two applications, one for the desktop and one for the session, but neither contains font preferences, widget themes, or several other categories one might expect. Still, the set of bundled utilities continues to grow — it now includes a clipboard, keyboard manager, and battery status applet, all of which are still listed as third-party add-ons on the applications wiki page.

Razor-qt works with multiple monitors. As it does not implement the "overlay" effect that GNOME Shell, Unity, and Cinnamon use to bring up the window switcher or application search functions, there are fewer bugs reported in relation to its multi-monitor support. Current support is basic, but there are feature requests asking for enhancements.

Razor-qt is also commendable for providing API documentation, even at such an early stage in its development. The documentation includes references for the DE's XDG implementations and for its original desktop environment and session classes. That will no doubt come in handy for attracting new contributors.

It is hard to go into much more detail about Razor-qt's environment, because it is (quite intentionally) so simple. The project's home page gives "simplicity, speed, and an intuitive interface" as its goals, along with the ability to run on "weak machines". It does the job without fanfare. The GTK+-based lightweight DEs offer a more complete package at the moment, but they have a considerable head start as well. The Qt framework encompasses more than GTK+ does, so as the project progresses, it is reasonable to expect it to catch up, without piling on too many additional dependencies or custom libraries.

Conclusion

There seems to be an implicit "should we switch?" question behind most of the blog reviews published about Cinnamon, Razor-qt, and other alternative desktop projects. The short answer is "no," of course: both are still very wet behind the ears, which means missing pieces and instabilities. The more interesting question is what each of the projects means for the Linux desktop ecosystem. Neither has a firm roadmap published, but there are potentially interesting implications to both projects.

First, with the arrival of Cinnamon, hopefully it is clear at this point that GNOME users' criticisms about GNOME Shell cannot all be dismissed solely as "fear of change." The extensions community and all-out forks like Cinnamon implement specific feature changes (application menus, window lists, relocation of the clock and notifications) unavailable when GNOME Shell debuted, and hopefully they will be accepted (even if not adopted as defaults) by the upstream developers. The usability concerns about "large screen" desktops versus "small screen" tablets are not quite as easily solved, but if no one tries then no progress is possible. Cinnamon's existence clarifies that someone can like GNOME 3 technology, but still make a valid argument that there is more than one way to implement a usable desktop with it.

Razor-qt, for its part, offers application developers the tantalizing possibility of clarifying the distinction between KDE and Qt, which are too often confused by users. Simply providing users with another choice — and in this case, a substantially different one than Xfce and LXDE — is empowering to those users, but it can also serve to push the Qt project ahead. The qtxdg library is one example, and probably will not be the last. On top of that, additional platforms equal more testing, and as Qt makes a play for embedded devices, the more diverse its ecosystem, the better it will do.

Index entries for this article
GuestArticles	Willis, Nathan

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