Ubuntu 12.04 Desktop WITHOUT Unity

As much as I enjoy Ubuntu, I haven’t warmed to their Unity desktop. I personally find it’s too similar to OS X, I don’t really like the launcher with larger icons, the global menu, the shifted window control buttons, notification area changes .. etc.

Since it’s based on GTK3, I know you can modify this all, but I’d rather just use a desktop environment that doesn’t require that level of tweaking.

Enter Cinnamon. Cinnamon is developed by the Linux Mint team, which has a distribution based on Ubuntu.

Over at the LinuxBSDOS blog, there was an article on how to get Cinnamon installed in the latest Ubuntu.

I found that after doing this, I ended up with no sound. To fix this, AskUbuntu has an article that I found useful.