Cinnamon is a fork of GNOME Shell developed by Linux Mint Team which brings many features of modern GNOME Shell but with traditional GNOME 2 layout. Cinnamon is in "heavy" development stage, after 4 months of developments and 626 commits, Cinnamon 1.6 has been released with many bug fixes and new features.


Workspace OSD
Simply you can add workspace by clicking "+" plus button. This change is permanent even you log off or reboot the computer.


Alt-Tab Switcher with Thumbnail and Window Preview


There are four options to control the behaviour of Alt+Tab Switcher: Icons only, icons and thumbnails, icons and window preview, window preview (no icons). Use Cinnamon Settings to change the options.


More Space for Cover Art, more controls and display
Sound applet gets many changes and improvements too!


New desktop background selection
Cinnamon 1.6 comes with new background selection screen. It also support Nemo integration. Nemo is default file manager of Cinnamon.


Install Cinnamon 1.6 on Ubuntu
Cinnamon 1.6 can be installed on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Precise Pangolin and the upcoming Ubuntu 12.10 Quantal Quetzal. If you are using Ubuntu 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot, you can still install Cinnamon 1.4. Please run the following command:
  • sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gwendal-lebihan-dev/cinnamon-stable
  • sudo apt-get update
  • sudo apt-get install cinnamon
Once installed, log out and choose Cinnamon session when logging in.

In case, you want to remove Cinnamon, simply run the following command:
  • sudo apt-get remove cinnamon
  • sudo apt-get autoremove

Enjoy :)

via: Cinnamon website