Mint's Cinnamon desktop integrated into Fedora 17 (it will be likely part of F18)

[dcharlespyle]

I have been using Cinnamon for several days now. While there is much that I like about it, there are several things that are problems.

1. I cannot take screenshots on Fedora 17 while running anything Cinnamon. Full screenshots do not capture any applications but what happens is the desktop rises to the front and gets the shot, leaving everything else out of it. Partial screenshots of individual application windows are so dark as to be unseeable and unusable for the purposes of troubleshooting.

2. The window manager is very unstable under certain circumstances. I have had it crash several times while reworking the code in the weather applet to suit my needs (I added Barometric State, using math symbols to display "steady," "rising," and "falling," and eight more cardinal directions, as well as set it up to display "Wind: CALM" rather than "Wind: N 0 mph" when wind speed is zero). If I was not in the habit of saving before running/restarting the window manager I would have been screwed several times over. It is not stable enough for production work. With this fixed it would become the desktop of choice for my entire family.

3. Cinnamon wreaks havoc on Stellarium 0.11.3. I cannot run it at all at full-screen. The graphics are totally corrupted while it is running at full screen. (This might also be related to another issue that occurs on Gnome 3.4.2, which is that Stellarium 0.11.3 crashes X when started at fullscreen while running in Gnome 3.4.2, which does not happen in KDE). At least Stellarium runs at full screen in Gnome 3.4.2 if I start it maximized and then run it at full screen after being loaded.

4. Cinnamon, while running graphics intensive applications in it, sucks up huge amounts of CPU cycles on both cores of my processor, as well as memory, and this is with a video card with 1024 MBytes of dedicated GDDR5 memory on the card.

5. Fairly frequently, when running some applications, such as Yumex, residual graphics from the login screen will show up in the middle of the application window when it first opens up. The same thing happens after logging into xscreensaver. Several applications that run and dialogs will show portions of the xscreensaver login dialog in them. Apparently, the window manager, Muffin, does not properly flush out old images from the buffer. I had the same problem in both the fglrx AMD driver and the open source radeon driver.

6. Some applications on load cause Cinnamon to flicker rapidly. Good thing I am not an Epilectic and/or don't get migraines from stuff like this.

In spite of its problems, it has promise and I am glad that it was packaged for Fedora. I plan to keep using it for a while to see what improvements are made in coming months. I especially like the way it looks with what has become my favorite theme (although with a couple glitches of its own), "DarkCold." Hopefully, it won't cause a failed upgrade of Fedora 18 when that comes out. (I had a really bad experience with both Preupgrade and Anaconda this time around when going from 16 to 17, and even with a clean installation of 17, so I don't need another reason for failure in addition). Heck, I'm even hoping for a working Cheese installation. (Cheese has not worked for me since after Fedora 14, with one odd exception--a completely bjorked upgrade, caused by a crash in Anaconda near the end of the upgrade while using the DVD, left me with a working Cheese after finally getting Fedora 17 to boot, with a fresh installation leaving it not working again).

Fingers crossed! :-)

Originally Posted by dcharlespyle

I have been using Cinnamon for several days now. While there is much that I like about it, there are several things that are problems.

1. I cannot take screenshots on Fedora 17 while running anything Cinnamon. Full screenshots do not capture any applications but what happens is the desktop rises to the front and gets the shot, leaving everything else out of it. Partial screenshots of individual application windows are so dark as to be unseeable and unusable for the purposes of troubleshooting.

2. The window manager is very unstable under certain circumstances. I have had it crash several times while reworking the code in the weather applet to suit my needs (I added Barometric State, using math symbols to display "steady," "rising," and "falling," and eight more cardinal directions, as well as set it up to display the word "Wind: CALM" rather than "Wind: N 0 mph" when wind speed is zero). If I was not in the habit of saving before running/restarting the window manager I would have been screwed several times over. It is not stable enough for production work. With this fixed it would become the desktop of choice for my entire family.

3. Cinnamon wreaks havoc on Stellarium 0.11.3. I cannot run it at all at full-screen. The graphics are totally corrupted while it is running at full screen. (This might also be related to another issue that occurs on Gnome 3.4.2, which is that Stellarium 0.11.3 crashes X when started at fullscreen while running in Gnome 3.4.2, which does not happen in KDE).

4. Cinnamon, while running graphics intensive applications in it, sucks up huge amounts of CPU cycles on both cores of my processor, as well as memory, and this is with a video card with 1024 MBytes of dedicated GDDR5 memory on the card.

5. Fairly frequently, when running some applications, such as Yumex, residual graphics from the login screen will show up in the middle of the application window when it first opens up. The same thing happens after logging into xscreensaver. Several applications that run and dialogs will show portions of the xscreensaver login dialog in them. Apparently, the window manager, Muffin, does not properly flush out old images from the buffer. I had the same problem in both the fglrx AMD driver and the open source radeon driver.

6. Some applications on load cause Cinnamon to flicker rapidly. Good thing I am not an Epilectic or get migraines from stuff like this.

In spite of its problems, it has promise and I am glad that it was packaged for Fedora. I plan to keep using it for a while to see what improvements are made in coming months. Hopefully, it won't cause a failed upgrade of Fedora 18 when that comes out. (I had a really bad experience with both Preupgrade and Anaconda this time around when going from 16 to 17, and even with a clean installation of 17, so I don't need another reason for failure in addition).

Fingers crossed! :-)

That is a hardware/driver issue not muffin.

P.S I have manage to reproduce on gnome-shell and cinnamon with fglrx.

[dcharlespyle]

I get the same behavior with either fglrx or the open source radeon. It may be a hardware issue but it is in that Muffin does not play nice with my ATi card. That does make it a Muffin problem, too, I hate to say.

I think I have figured out what is happening with Stellarium, though. This also is a Muffin/CInnamon thing. The panel and Stellarium seem to be fighting for dominance on the screen. If I click at the very bottom of the screen, on the part of the panel that keeps fighting to stay on top, the flickering does not complelely stop but it gets better. It at least allows me to see to click the button afterward to return from full screen mode in Stellarium. I'd provide a screenshot but screenshots epically fail because Muffin jumps the desktop and panel up front and hides everything else, including the corrupted Stellarium application graphics.

I'd place the blame on Gnome, Muffin and Cinnamon for what is happening. I am sure that these problems eventually will be fixed--but not if too many people deny that these components share some or more of the blame for the problems and refuse to find the causes and fix them. :-)

[deanej]

Isn't the high CPU usage a Gnome problem too? I think it's because the gnome developers made the very bad decision to base the entire DE on CSS and JavaScript, even though those technologies are very slow and designed solely for webapps.

[dcharlespyle]

Gnome does use high CPU in shorter bursts and uses considerably less CPU than does Cinnamon, which is built on and interconnects with Gnome while running (even using many of its settings and being incorporated into gconf (dconf-editor will confirm that for you)).

On Cinnamon, just running my mouse around the screen does it, even running up to 90% at times, which is of concern to me. It is worse when applications that are graphics intensive (like Stellarium) are being run at the same time. It is as though Gnome and Muffin are not taking advantage of the GPU in the graphics card and are partly if not almost wholly relying on the CPU to process graphics. I could be wrong but that is the way it looks at the moment.

While web technologies like Javascript and CSS can be slow on websites, particularly badly written ones, it seems bearable to me. Graphics and animations and loading webpages and web-based interfaces can be tuned up and speed increased programmatically and otherwise. CSS generally is called (generally for the setting up of styles, parameters of the interface, and so forth) when the GUI first starts up so I don't think that is the cause of the high CPU once the interface is up and running and located in memory. CSS files generally are also not very large--in the realm of k in the low teens at most rather than Mbytes of memory-resident programs.

Most programs do not rely on the same when starting up--unless they also are web-based. However, web-based interfaces would seem to be the way of the future. They are supposed to run much more quickly on a local machine than they would on server side to a remote client. They seem to do so for me.

The brunt of the blame, I think, sits squarely on the shoulders of the window manager in the case of Cinnamon. There are many issues that remain to be fixed. I think that will happen once popularity grows and as long as people don't go into denial about the fact that there are problems that need fixing. For one thing, the window manager needs to take more advantage of GPU acceleration rather than rely mainly on the CPU, in my opinion. If I had the expertise in that realm I would gladly lend a hand with all of that.

The real test of bearability, however, will be when I install it on an older computer my children will use. That one barely meets the minimum requirements of Fedora 17. :-)

[deanej]

Interpreted languages are simply inappropriate for something as intensive as a DE due to the performance cost. For me, the fist log in after booting happens at a glacial pace regardless of if I'm using Gnome 3 or cinnamon, and menus etc. have noticeable lag.

I honestly don't have the screenshot problem. That issue is unique to your computer.

Your problems don't seem unique to cinnamon to me. I had all of them except the screenshot one (and maybe the stellarium one? I don't remember, been a while since I used gnome) on Gnome 3. There's also some kind of issue with Rhythmbox; 90% of my crashes happen while listening to a podcast (a problem made worse by the fact that Rhythmbox can't remember the playback position of something, so I have to restart listening from the beginning!).

This reply was to be longer, but while testing stellarium (I've never seen the graphics corrupted with it, but I have seen the menu bars on top of it) the window manager froze on me. It's a shame you can't restart X without losing work.

[dcharlespyle]

I agree with you about the glacial logins. However, Cinnamon is worse and takes twice as long to login for me as does Gnome 3.4.2 shell. The login speed increases, as well the video corruption (which happens for a few seconds before the login dialog comes up) goes away (I also get a nice fade-in effect) when I use the proprietary driver, however.

The screenshot problem is not unique with my machine. There are other references to it happening to other people. Take a look around the Internet and particularly over at the Linux Mint Forums to other examples.

People are quick to blame the AMD proprietary drivers for it but, at least in my case, changing the drivers to open source made zero difference. The same thing is happening to nVIdia and IntelHD users as well, so it is not just AMD. It is the window manager.

When I am not running Cinnamon I do not have the screenshot problem, not even in Gnome shell. I believe very strongly that it is a Muffin problem. It is similar to something I once saw with other software based on Clutter a couple years ago. And, Muffin is, after all is said and done, based on Clutter.

In addition, I have seen some really interesting things, such as the last screenshot I attempted. No program was running and the menu was not up but when I took the screenshot it shows a faint, ghostly menu up on screen as though I clicked the menu button! Opening a brower to type this displayed a sudden flash of the contents of the logon screen!

Muffin is not letting go of images and is not flushing out the buffers of the video card properly, regardless of whether or not the proprietary drivers are used. I have tested it and know better. It is a window manager problem and it should be tracked down and fixed. That won't happen if people continue to deny that it is happening or continue to blame AMD when it is not just AMD cards that are experiencing these sorts of problems.

Really odd, that is...

Tried to use the screenshot and record applet. It works for clearer screenshots but I still have the problem of windows showing up in the screenshots that have been closed before the screenshots were taken. That, again, is a window manager issue.

[deanej]

That still doesn't change the fact that I have never, ever seen this issue and have been using cinnamon for months now.

Since I run Fedora 16 I've never seen a Gnome version later than 3.2; given what I've heard of the new lock screen, I don't think I want to either. I've also heard nothing but bad things about the proprietary drivers so I won't run them.

[dcharlespyle]

Originally Posted by deanej

That still doesn't change the fact that I have never, ever seen this issue and have been using cinnamon for months now.

Since I run Fedora 16 I've never seen a Gnome version later than 3.2; given what I've heard of the new lock screen, I don't think I want to either. I've also heard nothing but bad things about the proprietary drivers so I won't run them.

That doesn't change the fact that I have, and that there are others out there who also have, and that it makes no difference whether or not proprietary drivers are used or not, and no difference as to whether it is AMD/Ati, nVidia, or Intel cards. You haven't seen the problem--yet. That is wonderful. Hopefully, you never do.

We already have established that you are using an older version of Gnome. Perhaps that has something to do with it? Or, perhaps the version of Cinnamon and Muffin that you are using are not up-to-date, either? For those of us who like to stay up to the minute with updates, Cinnamon may well pose a problem. It also does not change the fact that a problem exists and that I am not the only one experiencing it.

As to the proprietary drivers, YMMV. I have been seeing some good results with the latest version I have been using, which is 12.6 for the AMD/ATi proprietary driver. For many of those who got bad results in the past, it often turned out to be configuration errors on the part of the user (things such as failing to blacklist the open source radeon or nouveau, failing to turn off kernel mode setting, forgetting to make sure to rebuild initramfs and related operations after installation, using wrong settings in xorg.conf relative to their hardware, and the like). As I said, YMMV. :-)

I am just sharing what I have experienced with muffin and cinnamon. In fact, I am still using cinnamon in spite of the problems I have experienced. I like to live on the edge sometimes. :-)

Originally Posted by dcharlespyle

That doesn't change the fact that I have, and that there are others out there who also have, and that it makes no difference whether or not proprietary drivers are used or not, and no difference as to whether it is AMD/Ati, nVidia, or Intel cards. You haven't seen the problem--yet. That is wonderful. Hopefully, you never do.

We already have established that you are using an older version of Gnome. Perhaps that has something to do with it? Or, perhaps the version of Cinnamon and Muffin that you are using are not up-to-date, either? For those of us who like to stay up to the minute with updates, Cinnamon may well pose a problem. It also does not change the fact that a problem exists and that I am not the only one experiencing it.

As to the proprietary drivers, YMMV. I have been seeing some good results with the latest version I have been using, which is 12.6 for the AMD/ATi proprietary driver. For many of those who got bad results in the past, it often turned out to be configuration errors on the part of the user (things such as failing to blacklist the open source radeon or nouveau, failing to turn off kernel mode setting, forgetting to make sure to rebuild initramfs and related operations after installation, using wrong settings in xorg.conf relative to their hardware, and the like). As I said, YMMV. :-)

I am just sharing what I have experienced with muffin and cinnamon. In fact, I am still using cinnamon in spite of the problems I have experienced. I like to live on the edge sometimes. :-)

That doesn't change the fact that I have, and that there are others out there who also have, and that it makes no difference whether or not proprietary drivers are used or not, and no difference as to whether it is AMD/Ati, nVidia, or Intel cards. You haven't seen the problem--yet. That is wonderful. Hopefully, you never do.

Well till they report it or I can reproduce it this issue doesn't exist.
See what I mean?

https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgd.../bugs/cinnamon

We already have established that you are using an older version of Gnome. Perhaps that has something to do with it? Or, perhaps the version of Cinnamon and Muffin that you are using are not up-to-date, either? For those of us who like to stay up to the minute with updates, Cinnamon may well pose a problem. It also does not change the fact that a problem exists and that I am not the only one experiencing it.

I can guarantee I'm running newer version of muffin and cinnamon, these issue do not exist for me.

$ rpm -qa cinnamon muffin\*
muffin-devel-1.0.6-0.1.gitaf1e0b9.fc17.x86_64
muffin-1.0.6-0.1.gitaf1e0b9.fc17.x86_64
cinnamon-1.5.1-0.1.git49593cb.fc17.x86_64

As to the proprietary drivers, YMMV. I have been seeing some good results with the latest version I have been using, which is 12.6 for the AMD/ATi proprietary driver. For many of those who got bad results in the past, it often turned out to be configuration errors on the part of the user (things such as failing to blacklist the open source radeon or nouveau, failing to turn off kernel mode setting, forgetting to make sure to rebuild initramfs and related operations after installation, using wrong settings in xorg.conf relative to their hardware, and the like). As I said, YMMV. :-)

As co-maintainer for the catalyst driver I noticed high CPU usage when using shell or cinnamon for video playback.
The driver is marginally better than last year.

---------- Post added at 02:09 PM ---------- Previous post was at 11:32 AM ----------

Newer packages now available

https://admin.fedoraproject.org/upda...n-1.5.1-1.fc17

[RupertPupkin]

I agree with dcharlespyle that denying that certain problems exist with Cinnamon isn't a good idea. He's right that there are lots of people on the Mint forums experiencing many problems with Cinnamon: http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewforum.php?f=208

That makes sense, since Cinnamon is (as GarethJones pointed out) still really new. So of course it's going to have lots of bugs that need to be fixed. The potential problem I see for Cinnamon is that it doesn't have the developer manpower behind it that GNOME does. When Fedora became the first distro to ship with GNOME 3, by having such a large user base (the largest among Linux distros, in fact, and by a wide margin) a lot of bug reports got filed. The GNOME team has the manpower (though perhaps not always the desire ) to get around to fixing those bugs. From everything I've read, the current version of GNOME 3 is much improved over that initial release in F15. I don't think Cinnamon has anywhere near as many developers working on it.

And that's what could make this interesting. By having Cinnamon in the official Fedora repos, Cinnamon is about to get a much wider exposure than it's had so far. That could be good, in the sense that more bug reports will get filed and hopefully those bugs will get fixed. On the other hand, it has the potential to have the opposite effect: the Cinnamon team could get overwhelmed with bug reports and not have enough people to fix them, giving Cinnamon a bad name and causing people to stop using it. It seems like reputations are often hard to shake in the FOSS world, and if Cinnamon comes off as too buggy now then people might just assume it always will be. So I'm curious to see how this all works out.

Originally Posted by RupertPupkin

I agree with dcharlespyle that denying that certain problems exist with Cinnamon isn't a good idea. He's right that there are lots of people on the Mint forums experiencing many problems with Cinnamon: http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewforum.php?f=208

That makes sense, since Cinnamon is (as GarethJones pointed out) still really new. So of course it's going to have lots of bugs that need to be fixed. The potential problem I see for Cinnamon is that it doesn't have the developer manpower behind it that GNOME does. When Fedora became the first distro to ship with GNOME 3, by having such a large user base (the largest among Linux distros, in fact, and by a wide margin) a lot of bug reports got filed. The GNOME team has the manpower (though perhaps not always the desire ) to get around to fixing those bugs. From everything I've read, the current version of GNOME 3 is much improved over that initial release in F15. I don't think Cinnamon has anywhere near as many developers working on it.

And that's what could make this interesting. By having Cinnamon in the official Fedora repos, Cinnamon is about to get a much wider exposure than it's had so far. That could be good, in the sense that more bug reports will get filed and hopefully those bugs will get fixed. On the other hand, it has the potential to have the opposite effect: the Cinnamon team could get overwhelmed with bug reports and not have enough people to fix them, giving Cinnamon a bad name and causing people to stop using it. It seems like reputations are often hard to shake in the FOSS world, and if Cinnamon comes off as too buggy now then people might just assume it always will be. So I'm curious to see how this all works out.

If there not listed here they don't exist (well they might but there not my problem ).


https://admin.fedoraproject.org/pkgd.../bugs/cinnamon

[deanej]

If it's not reported there's no way to know if it's a legit bug or if it's just something along the lines of the way people blamed MS for their hardware not working when Vista came out when it was the hardware makers not starting driver development until a month after Vista came out that caused the problem.

[dcharlespyle]

I spent a couple days experimenting with the newer versions of the packages. I removed the proprietary drivers but still got the same behavior. So, I reinstalled mesa drivers. Still no joy. So, I reinstalled the i686 packages and there was improvement. There was less flashing. There was more stability.

I then tweaked video card settings in an xorg.conf and got really good results. I still wanted more, however, and tried a tip I saw over at the Linux Mint site, which was to run cinnamon --replace. I did it and got near perfection. So, I decided that I wanted to keep those really good settings but GDM just kept taking over on reboot. I made a startup option that would run that command on startup. I got flawless video from the window manager. Then, I tried to login to Gnome and got less than desirable results. So, I unchecked the startup option I had created in Cinnamon and was able to login.

When I tried to log back into Cinnamon, however, I was greeted with the following error:

No system tray detected on this system.
Unable to start. Exiting.

I was able to logon to Cinnamon 2D but not Cinnamon, unless I turned back on my startup option to automatically run the command mentioned above, from within Cinnamon 2D. I can then log back onto Cinnamon with flawless video.

Looks like Cinnamon isn't any longer going to play nice with Gnome. If I can't fix this somehow, I think I will be reporting this as a bug. Any suggestions for things to try? I have already reinstalled both muffin and cinnamon but nothing has changed after several hours of missing with things.

Here is where I am at:

$ rpm -qa cinnamon muffin\*
muffin-debuginfo-1.0.5-1.fc17.x86_64
muffin-1.0.5-1.fc17.x86_64
cinnamon-1.5.1-1.fc17.x86_64
muffin-devel-1.0.5-1.fc17.x86_64

If cinnamon session fails but cinnamon --replace works, it's a indication that your video card maybe blacklisted by gnome-session.