Figure 1-6. Cinnamon desktop with menu
As I’ve suggested above, there were concerns about GNOME 3 and the change in the
look and behavior of the desktop. Some might say this was an understatement, and
the reversion of some distributions to other looks might be considered proof of that.
Regardless, Cinnamon was one response to GNOME 3 by creating a shell that sat on
top of the underlying GNOME 3 architecture.
MATE
, on the other hand, is an out‐
right fork of GNOME 2. For anyone familiar with GNOME 2, MATE will seem famil‐
iar. It’s an implementation of the classic look of GNOME 2. You can see this running
on Kali in
Figure 1-7
. Again, the menu is shown so you can see that you will get the
same easy access to applications in all of the environments.
The choice of desktop environment is entirely personal. One desktop that I have left
off here but that is still very much an option is the K Desktop Environment (KDE).
There are two reasons for this. The first is that I have always found KDE to be fairly
heavyweight, although this has evened out some with GNOME 3 and the many pack‐
ages it brings along with it. KDE never felt as quick as GNOME and certainly Xfce.
However, a lot of people like it. More particularly, one reason for omitting an image
of it is that it looks an awful lot like Cinnamon. One of the objectives behind KDE
always seemed to be to clone the look and feel of Windows so users coming from that
platform would feel comfortable.