I’ve touched on Cinnamon quite a few times now, as it has become my personal choice of desktop environment, but I thought I’d share some of Cinnamons own tweaks that are system independent, you should check out.

All of these can be installed from their respective section of the System Settings application in the Cinnamon environment, such as “Applets” and “Extensions” and “Themes.”

What are Spices?

Some people find little use or desire to theme or tweak their systems, where as I on the other hand, absolutely love to customize my system.

Spices, are what the Cinnamon devs have decided to call addons, extensions, and tweaks for the environment; anything eye candy related basically.

Extensions

Extensions are the spice that changes things the most, in my eyes. They can do anything from change entire features of the environment, to adding transparency to things.

Note: Some extensions listed gave me a warning that they may break the system, because they are not compatible with my version of Cinnamon. I chose to ignore this warning, and test them myself. I am using Antergos, running Cinnamon 3.6.6. I can say that the tweaks below ran fine for me, but your mileage may vary.

My top picks are:

gTile

gTile is a handy extension that allows greater flexibility in how you tile windows on your screen, allowing for multiple different setups instead of the 50/50 default, as well as multi-monitor support.

Absolutely essential to anyone using Cinnamon, who still enjoys the use of tiles.

Opacify Windows

This one is fairly simple and straightforward, but a nice addition, that will make any window you click and drag to move, highly transparent. Useful, pretty, and functional.

Transparent Panels

This one again is straightforward and simple, but I love its effect. What this does, is turns any of your Panels to be fully transparent, so long as no windows are fully maximized. The effect, is when you are simply staring at your desktop, your panel is slightly hidden / blending in, but when you are in a maximized window plugging away at whatever it is you do, the panel is fully visible to not hinder your workflow. Not bad!

Win7 Alt-Tab

This one changes the way things look when you hit ALT+TAB. Rather than the default Cinnamon appearance, it changes to resemble the familiar Windows counterpart, and show thumbnails. I, prefer this over the default personally.

Applets

Applets are items that are added to your panel(s), such as showing the Weather, custom menus, etc.

The ones I use (not included by default) are:

Places Center

Places Center adds a single small folder icon to your panel. What I prefer to do is place it beside my applications menu. Upon clicking the folder, a list of all your major destinations and devices is listed, for quick and easy access to the specified location via file manager.

Weather

This one is pretty obvious. It shows the weather. It can be customized to suit methods of measurement you prefer, how many days information you want etc. I like to stick this in the center of my panel, at the top of my screen, since I use a dock at the bottom of my screen to replace the window list from the panel that I remove.