Despite my history using Linux over the past few years, and despite how I have to use a Mac at work, I typically default to not only Arch Linux, but Hyprland with my setup.
In short, I had a taste of tiling windows a few years ago starting with Awesome WM. After a few years of using it, however, Hyprland became my favorite despite how much I needed to do at first to customize it and make it mine.
But every so often, when I remember to update, Hyprland will break sooner or later. Today is one of those days.
Now, before anyone thinks this is somehow a strike from me against Hyprland, how the compositor somehow breaks too easily or is “too hard” to upkeep, that’s not what this is at all. In fact, I normally do a quick search and manage to fix Hyprland from the tty; it’s happened several times already.
Keep in mind that I use Hyprland-git, not the standard Arch repo version. I have experienced breaks maybe four or five times over the past couple of years using Hyprland on Arch. It’s just expected sometimes, and I normally don’t mind because Hyprland just looks and feels so nice. I love my setup and can’t imagine using anything else long-term. Whenever I troubleshoot and fix it, the result is always worth it.
But today was slightly different with my recent update. I tried to do a bit of troubleshooting, but I wasn’t feeling it this evening. In short, my past two days at work have been more annoying and hectic. Everything came to a boil earlier today as well before I had to clock out, so when I came home, I wasn’t in the mood to troubleshoot.
My Hyprland would just crash back to the display manager whenever I tried to login, meaning that I need to fix Hyprland again. Going into the tty revealed what I needed to know.
I had an error involving aquamarine-git and hyprutils-git conflicting or being stuck on older versions, causing hyprland-git to not update properly. The output originally told me that the AUR version of aquamarine was out of date, but installing it from the Arch repos (where it’s actually more up-to-date) threatened to break my existing setup due to dependency hell. Of course, from tty, I decided to try and rebuild the package and see if that would update it.
yay -Syu --rebuild aquamarine-git
But that’s when I discovered that hyprutils-git was having issues when I tried to do this. I tried rebuilding both of them, tried a simple git clone of the relevant packages directly from the AUR myself, but nothing was really working.
With my not-so-great work day in mind, I wasn’t feeling the need to keep going, at least for today. I knew I could fix it eventually, and I know I will.
But in the meantime, I still have Cinnamon installed on my system. Consequently, I selected it on my display manager and used it for a bit of light computing tonight.
Why Cinnamon?
I know I wrote about Krusader a while back, but I found myself back to using Nemo as my file manager shortly afterward. When I first used Linux again in 2020, my go-to was always Dolphin. This was mostly because modern KDE got me interested in using Linux again. Once I explored window managers and more GTK-based setups, I found Nemo the nicest. Nemo has been my default for the majority of my time on Linux.
As part of my setup, at least when I last set up Arch Linux, Cinnamon had to at least be installed for me to use Nemo. I’m not sure if this is still the case, but I didn’t mind because Nemo has always been so good to me. Even if I hadn’t planned to use Cinnamon, having it installed was no big deal if it meant I could keep using Nemo. Plus, I didn’t have to install so many packages to make this a reality!
So tonight, I decided to login to Cinnamon again for the first time in a while.
Sure, my Cinnamon doesn’t have tiling windows, or the type of snapping that I like, or the default x11-friendly fork of Rofi, or my awesome Waybar config, or the same degree of customization that other DEs have like GNOME or KDE.
But despite all of that, I still like it a lot! It’s so comfortable to use, even if it’s for brief stints and just some occasions here and there.
Full disclosure, but I did at least set up and configure my Cinnamon desktop at some points several, several months ago when Hyprland last broke, but it’s still extremely pleasant to use. I’m not sure if it has anything to do with its design paradigm or what, but using Cinnamon is so pleasant, even if I’m missing a lot of my quality-of-life features from Hyprland.
Cinnamon doesn’t seem as heavy as its more modern and feature-filled contemporaries like the aforementioned KDE or GNOME, yet it feels like it has more consistency than the likes of something like XFCE. Now, I’m not one to hate on XFCE, especially when it’s configured with tiling windows, but Cinnamon feels like it’s firmly in this warm and safe middle ground to me.
Are You Going to Stay on Cinnamon?
No, not really.
I’m still going to fix Hyprland, although at the time I type this (and off the cuff, if it hasn’t been obvious by this point), I’m putting it off until tomorrow at earliest. While I normally don’t mind tweaking and fixing my system, even I sometimes need to kick back every once in a while.
But still, it’s pleasant to have it installed as a fallback on my system, and this is largely me acknowledging that. I can still appreciate a simple, traditionally-designed desktop environment.
So here’s to the simplicity of Cinnamon. Thank you for being there for those days, when I just want things to work well enough.
What about you? Do you enjoy using Cinnamon as a desktop environment, or do you use something else entirely? If you’re a tiling WM user, do you ever “fall back” on a full-on DE if or when things stop working correctly? Feel free to share in the comments below!
Sudo Science 
3 responses to “Cinnamon Desktop is Cozy Sometimes”
I honestly can’t even with hyprland. There is no easy way to just test drive it without polluting your environment. There is dot installer but that still will wreck tons of your configuration if any of it overlaps with anything you use. Not to mention the horrible defaults (not any really) and much else. The autotile system also never seems to work in a way anyone I could imagine would ever actually want besides Reddit ricers. Sway is actually sane to a degree in comparison and it too has a ton of problems on a lack of defaults that virtually everyone does after the fact. If 90% of the users have to do several key things to make it usable maybe just do those key things as a feature.
For instance, I wager the number of people that use either without waybar and having a key specific sets of config for waybar…it’s insane those just don’t come with Sway. It has to be single percentage of people.
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I see where you’re coming from, honestly. I didn’t get tiling WMs for a long time, and it seems like quite a few don’t have any defaults in general. Thankfully, some do, like Awesome WM. It even has its own bar so you don’t have to go configure polybar and the like. You do raise a good point with that; a lack of defaults in general was partially why I didn’t stick with xmonad or bspwm when I first tried those. I would even go as far as saying Awesome WM is a great starting point for tiling windows for any Linux users who might otherwise be skeptical at first.
Autotiling seems a lot smoother on some setups compared to others, but now that you mention it working in a way one would want, I’m starting to realize that Awesome WM was probably the best experience I had with different tiling setups that I could easily toggle between. Granted, I’m sure I could always fix that in my Hyprland setup, but I haven’t figured out how just yet. I also notice that, for the most part, trying to get tiling windows in a non-Linux OS, like Windows or macOS, seems to result in quirky behavior compared to if I just did the same on Linux.
Full disclosure, but I did get my feet wet with Hyprland ages ago when I saw a video about configuring it, and it came with the video uploader’s script and personal setup. After I tried it for the first time at that point, as a previously diehard Awesome WM user, I actively wanted to start using it full time.
I don’t really have much to say about Sway. I did try it briefly maybe four years ago, but thought x11 was perfectly adequate at the time, so I went back to using Awesome.
As for users having to do a lot to make the system feel usable, I used to be in the same boat. I remembered wondering, “Why would anybody want to configure that much when a desktop environment works perfectly fine?” But once I finally understood the appeal of tiling WMs, I started to appreciate the degree of control, although I can acknowledge that it’s certainly not for everyone. My tech-savvy best friend works full time in IT, yet he not only uses Apple for nearly everything because “it just works,” but whenever the subject of configuring things this much on Linux comes up, he always dismisses it as “too granular.” I get that many people simply want things to work. I even felt like that last night to an extent.
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AwesomeWM does hit an awesome stride. It provides a good setup out of the box. Maybe I’m just an old bitter ninny. I run mostly sway on my boxes now though I also have Cosmic as even in alpha it’s interesting in how it has some much more solid tiling features than KDE or gnome. System76 seems to have potential in being a major force in directing the experience in Linux. Hyprland is great to explore. It’s surprisingly stable considering how low the contributor count is especially with such low tier financial support.
It’s just a matter of priorities for me honestly. I want Hyprland to have a big base because a big base means big contributors that will innovate the things that annoyed me.
Just for kicks, I actually really like your blog. I added it to my RSS and a lot of your posts make me think a bit.
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