Cinnamon

In short: Cinnamon is the desktop of Linux Mint. It looks like a classic Windows with start menu, task bar and system tray and is especially beginner-friendly.

In more detail: Cinnamon arose in 2011 as an answer to the GNOME 3 change and is a fork of GNOME Shell. It is developed by the Linux Mint team, with its own file manager Nemo.

In detail

• Operation: menu at bottom left, customisable panel, applets and desklets.
• Wayland: a Wayland session is being worked on and partly available, X11 remains the default.
• Programs: Nemo (files), Xed (editor), Warpinator (files over the network), Mint tools for updates and drivers.
• Resources: a bit more than Xfce, about 700 MB of RAM.
• Distributions: Linux Mint, also Fedora Cinnamon, Debian.

See also: MATE, Linux desktop environments at a glance