Cinnamon

This article is Part 4 in a 5-Part Series.

Part 1 - Ubuntu-Zero To Deploy
Part 2 - Z-shell
Part 3 - Vim
Part 4 - This Article
Part 5 - Ruby on Rails

Cinnamon

Cinnamon is my favourite desktop environment since it is simple, elegant and easy to use so lets install cinnamon and get rid of Unity… Cinnamon community is very much active and whenever they launch a new version, it will be uploaded immediately to stable PPA so that Ubuntu users can directly install without any hassle..

  sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gwendal-lebihan-dev/cinnamon-stable
  sudo apt-get update
  sudo apt-get install cinnamon

File manager

Lets make nemo as default file manager

  sudo apt-get install nemo
  xdg-mime default nemo.desktop inode/directory application/x-gnome-saved-search
  gsettings set org.gnome.desktop.background show-desktop-icons false
  gsettings set org.nemo.desktop show-desktop-icons true

Removing Unity

Remove unity and related packages..

sudo apt-get autoremove --purge unity unity-common unity-services unity-lens-* unity-scope-* unity-webapps-* 
gnome-control-center-unity hud libunity-core-6* libunity-misc4 libunity-webapps* appmenu-gtk appmenu-gtk3 appmenu-qt* 
overlay-scrollbar* activity-log-manager-control-center firefox-globalmenu thunderbird-globalmenu libufe-xidgetter0 
xul-ext-unity xul-ext-webaccounts webaccounts-extension-common xul-ext-websites-integration compiz compiz-gnome 
compiz-plugins-default libcompizconfig0 nautilus nautilus-sendto nautilus-sendto-empathy nautilus-share

Install mdm

Ubuntu shipped with lightdm that cannot to configured after certain level but mdm has many eye candy features including html5 theme packs.

To install mdm lets add a third party PPA from noobslab..

  sudo add-apt-repository ppa:noobslab/mint
  sudo apt-get update
  sudo apt-get install mdm mdm-themes

During the installaion you will be asked to change the default DM, choose mdm and hit enter..

After complete installation you can choose mdm theme from cinnamon theme option in system setup..