Cinnamon is a new desktop environment, forked from GNOME 3 by the developers of Linux Mint. It is intended as an optional desktop for those who have not taken kindly to GNOME 3 or Unity desktop environments. While it is still very rough around the edges, I find it a lot better to use than GNOME 3 and slightly better than Unity. It has nothing on KDE, though.

In this article, the simple steps required to install and use it in Ubuntu 11.10 are presented in an easy to follow manner.