on cinnamon, are the classic 'applications, places and system' menu available?

also can you change the window manager?

Applications is now All Applications, Places has a folder icon in the menu and there is not a system menu per say but System Tools. Preferences and Administration are still the same.

I can't answer for the window manager since I have only recently started using it on LMDE. I can say that there are options for managing the windows behavior and by default it is using Compiz but I have it turned off since I do not have enough graphics horsepower.

Themes and installation of them has also changed and is community driven. Hope this helps a bit.

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Thanks mate, i didn't think this would ever get answered. Well i guess until the clasic menu is made available i'll continue to delaye testing it out. Thankyou.

Cinnamon is a modified Gnome3, so I think you will find Cinnamon's Window Manager is Mutter and that will probably be a dependency of Gnome3 (Cinnamon). I don't think that will stop you installing other WMs but I don't think you can get rid of Mutter either. The best way for you to answer your own question about WMs is to have a look at Cinnamons control file it will tell you what dependencies it has.

EDIT: Forget my last edit, the WM is "muffin".

on my old frugalware partition I had gnome3 running and I tried switching the window manager to kwin, and it caused a GUI gtk error to be produced that informed me something unexpected had occured and i needed to logout. I'm pretty sure that cinnamon uses a different window manager to gnome3 called muffin and I wanted to know if it also suffers this limitation.

Good to see you read my entire post mate

Yes Cinnamon does use Muffin, I even linked to it. If you install Cinnamon you will need to install Muffin it won't install without it on a Debian based system. I know I just tried and can't install because Debian doesn't have Muffin in its repositories (muffin is actually an Ubuntu maintained package, go figure huh). If you have Gnome 3 and Mutter and log into Gnome 3 it should, notice I haven't given a definite answer but a should, still recognise Mutter. Likewise Cinnamon should recognise Muffin.

Your issue with Kwin and Gnome 3 is that Gnome relies on GTK3, Kwin is QT not GTK3.

yeah i guess so, but it begs the question, when you edited your post, why didn't you fix your mistake instead of makeing a small note at the bottom.

I'm guessing you've some knowledge on this matter, because of your sig. Do you mind explaining why the window manager being qt would have an effect, because i've run kwin in xfce and gnome2 with out any issues and they're GTK2.

Because it shows I'm human and make mistakes. As for making a small note that small note was the 3rd edit, you should have seen the 2 before it.

Just because I am working through developing Cobber, which is a hobby for me, doesn't mean I know alot. I sit down and figure things out as I go along.

Now to your question, I can only guess that the error message you received was because you were missing some GTK3 components. From what I can tell Gnome 3.x is far more dependent on GTK3 than Gnome 2.x was on GTK2. I have run various WMs (iceWM being my favourite) on Gnome 2 but never tried any apart from Mutter (and Metacity for gnome-session-fallback) on Gnome 3. The various development teams are integrating their own software tighter now and I personally find this annoying because it removes user choice from Linux which to me a core aspect of why I use it.

I was actually at work during a lunch break when i read your post and because of this did not have the time to check for replies constantly later on.

Thanks for explaining this.

I have noticed this too, mainly with the adition of shells, and i am in 100% agreeance with you. It's a shame that the desktop is going that way, and i was infact thinking about it earlier today, and have made a decission to give xfce another shot for these reasons; (i'm normally a kde guy).

I prefer Gnome Shell for a "relatively" complete user experience, I have a KDE version (4 actually) of Cobber but it is the one DE I cannot seem to work with easily. I like MATE which is a fork of the old Gnome 2.32, they have removed the dependency on Evolution (YAY), and it seems to work quite well. If you are interested in a possibly full featured "old style" DE I can recommend you try MATE. It is probably the last DE, of the Gnome style DEs, that gives you choice to use what you want.

After reading the new replies I learned a bit more too.Thank you both for filling in the gap. I like Cinnamon for now but I like the older version a bit better on my hardware. I may switch distros altogether not based on this but I am ready for new learning.