Ubuntu can be used officially with Cinnamon desktop environment from 23.04

Ubuntu can also be used with the Cinnamon desktop environment from version 23 onwards. There were unofficial builds for that, but Canonical is now officially making the shell available for the operating system.

The developers from Ubuntu parent company Canonical confirm in a mailing list that Cinnamon will be an official flavor for Ubuntu. This happens from version 23 of the operating system. That version, Lunar Lobster, is officially due out in April, but an experimental Daily Build based on Cinnamon can already be tried.

Cinnamon is the desktop environment mainly known from the popular distro Mint. Ubuntu uses Gnome by default but can also be downloaded as Kubuntu or Xubuntu with KDE or Xfce as the desktop environment. There has been for years an unofficial Cinnamon build for the operating system, but that was maintained by the community until now.

Ubuntu flavors must first be included in two non-LTS releases before they can be included in an official long-term release. If Ubuntu Cinnamon were to be included in 23.04 and later this year in 23.10, then Ubuntu 24.04 could become the next LTS release with official Cinnamon support.

In Cinnamon, Nemo is used as the default file manager. In addition, GIMP is included as a photo editing tool. Also, LibreOffice and Thunderbird are installed by default in the build.