When comparing dwm vs Cinnamon, the Slant community recommends dwm for most people. In the question“What are the best desktop environments for Arch Linux?” dwm is ranked 7th while Cinnamon is ranked 8th. The most important reason people chose dwm is:
Dwm is a low-resource window manager that is entirely simplistic in design.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Simple and small
Dwm is a low-resource window manager that is entirely simplistic in design.
Pro Encourages user modification
Dwm is part of the suckless suite of tools, and encourages users to extend and configure it by modifying the code itself. To this end, dwm is kept under 2000 SLOC, and is an exemplar of clean, readable code (C). This, while giving users all the flexibility they could ask for, also makes dwm as lightweight as possible, and means that users have a full understanding of how it works.
Pro XRandR/Xinerama support
Dwm has support for XRandR and Xinerama, allowing for multi-monitor support.
Pro Many and unique patches available
Thanks to the small codebase, many users contributed patches to the suckless website. They offer unique functionality, e.g. swallow or fakefullscreen, that is not seen in many other WMs.
Pro Sane defaults
Uses Master&Stack layout by default.
Pro Minimalist
Small and easy to digest source for those who want to patch it.
Pro Easy to configure
Configuring dwm is straight-forward thanks to its config.h file (though it will have to be rebuilt for the effects to take place).
Pro Fast
Feels even faster than others minimal window manager.
Pro Very customizable
The clean code and the patches allow us to configure dwm to be exactly what we want.
Pro Default keybindings and functionality are very useful and well thought-out
An example of this is the application of alt-tab to switch between two tags.
Pro No glitches
Imagine a window manager that works perfectly in every situation. No glitches, no delays, no slow downs, no focus problems. Even the best window managers out there have glitches but dwm. Dwm works flawless.
Pro Useful and informative status bar
The dwm status bar can be set to display all kinds of useful information, such as volume level, wifi signal strength, and battery notification.
Pro Application grouping with tags
Dwm's design paradigm is to use tags to group clients (applications) that can then be pulled into a view (workspace); this allows you to view multiple clients at once and to assign or reassign those tags and their related views on the fly.
Contrary to most other window managers, when you view a tag you are not ‘visiting’ a workspace: you are pulling the tagged windows into a single workspace.
Combined with rules in the config.h
, this makes for a flexible and responsive means to manage your workflow.
Pro Designed for traditional desktops
Intended for large-screen, non-touch devices that extend traditional concepts with functionality and good looking aesthetic.
Pro Fast, elegant and stable interface
Cinnamon uses a traditional desktop userflow that most computer users are familiar with.
Pro Lots of downloadable free themes
Plenty of themes, ready and free to be downloaded and applied with just a couple of clicks in a few seconds, with the file sizes mostly around 0.5 - 1MB.
Pro Very easy to customize
It's very easy to customize using the built in theme and applet tools. It automatically installs themes and desktop/panel applets for you, so you mostly won't have to go search online for them.
Pro The keyboard shortcut design is very friendly to users with Windows background
Your win+E, win+D etc are still working after migrating to Cinnamon from Windows.
Pro Nice themes and extensions
Very easy to make this desktop your own both in terms of looks and functionality.
Pro Very well supported
Has a great community and is very well supported through Linux Mint website.
Pro Stable DE
Pro Actively developed with useful new features in each release
E.g vertical panels are now there.
Pro Traditional desktop with the recent features
Cinnamon is a modern desktop that has the latest features, but at the same time it sticks to its way as a classic desktop and ignores trends/hypes like client side decorations or popover menus.
Pro You can easily get it to look like Windows
You can get it to closely look and behave like Windows with considerable ease. This is a good thing for those switching from Windows, because it gives them a familiar environment, cutting down on the learning curve a bit. Among the popular DE's this is the one that gets you closest with great ease.
Pro Best for users coming from Windows
Will look familiar to windows users making the transition easier.
Pro Vertical panel already available
Pro Cinnamon provides control of icon placement on multiple monitors
Cinnamon provides control of the placement of desktop icons on multiple monitor setups. This feature has been buggy, but in my testing of Linux Mint 19, this feature appeared to be stable. Thus, Cinnamon joins KDE and Windows in enabling this capability. For example, in a setup with 2 or 3 monitors, you can put the desktop icons on the right-hand monitor. With other DEs, the icons always move to the left-hand monitor.
Pro Can run apps meant for any other desktop environment
Cinnamon can run any app meant for any other DE, meaning the user can have apps for XFCE and KDE simultaneously and they will run as smoothly as if they're being run in the corresponding DE.
Pro Pretty design
Pro Uses X11
It uses the traditional and well supported xorg server.
Pro You can easily get it to look like a Mac
Pro Works well with cairo dock on bottom and cinnamenu on top
Pro Supports Widgets
You can place widgets on the desktop like a calculator or the weather.
Pro Addon manager integrated
It includes an addon manager for themes, widgets or plugins so you don't have to manually download them and place them in the theme directories.
Pro Titlebars
It does not use GNOME's Client Side decorations.
Pro You can disable overlay scrollbars
Cinnamon has a GUI option for that.
Pro Conservative look
Looks like Windows XP, Vista/7.
Pro Lots of configuration options
Both Gnome and Cinnamon got the same looking configuration panel. There are 40 sub-panels in Linux Mint Cinnamon's, whenever there a far less with Ubuntu Gnome 3's.
Windows, notification, smart corners, windows overlay, connection windows... you can have those in Gnome, but that requires compiz and other stuff.
Cons
Con No runtime config file
There is no config file that can be edited after the window manager is compiled: all changes need to be made prior to compiling.
Con By developers, for developers
Basic knowledge of C language, general programming, and compilation are all required.
Con The patch system breaks the code
To add features one has to patch the original code. That maybe easy to do with only one patch, but things can go down hill after 3+ patches, specially for those who don't know how to code on C.
Con More latency
It uses Xlib instead of XCB.
Con X11 only
X11 is outdated and insecure, there are Wayland clones such as Velox and dwl, but dwm still takes the cake.
Con Cumbersome main menu
Main menu takes a lot of space and is cumbersome to navigate.
Con Shell-style ≠ widget-style
The Cinnamon-shell is unable the use the current GTK style for its interface thus making it hard to get a consistent user interface.
Con Not Standalone
It still uses many GNOME applications to make it a complete Desktop Environment.
Con Conservative design and UX choices
Tries to be too much like traditional Windows (XP, Vista, 7).
Con Uses GTK
Nowadays, GTK is designed with GNOME, and only GNOME, in mind. Non-GNOME applications which attempt to utilize it suffer as a result.
Con Uses xorg and no Wayland Support
Con Needs more choices for useful panel applets
Cinnamon still lacks some useful choices for panel applets. For excellent management of panels and a rich choice of useful panel applets, I rely on Xfce.
Con Sound Settings not automatic
On Windows, for example, you can unplug a speaker and it will switch back to the laptop-speaker. In Cinnamon, you have to do it manually.
Con Few themes
Rather than using actual GTK theming, Cinnamon appears to vye for its own strange infrastructure that isn't compatible across any other desktop.
Con No traditional menu available
There is no mouse driven cascade menu, the only menus you'll get are big fat XP-like menus with scrollbars! Any X11 window manager has a better menu available than cinnamon.
Con Sometimes freezes
It can sometimes freeze which is really annoying.
Con Crashes
Despite Cinnamon being on its stable third version it still crashes occasionally, ranging from plugins all the way to drivers.
Con Bloated, and yet missing Gnome and Plasma's many features
Con Conservative management without more creativity
It is almost the same management like in 20-years old GNOME 2 environment. Although some elements are new.