When comparing Enlightenment vs Cinnamon, the Slant community recommends Cinnamon for most people. In the question“What are the best UNIX-like desktop environments for convertible laptops?” Cinnamon is ranked 8th while Enlightenment is ranked 18th. The most important reason people chose Cinnamon is:
Intended for large-screen, non-touch devices that extend traditional concepts with functionality and good looking aesthetic.
Specs
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Pros
Pro No programming experience required to configure the environment
Configuring the environment of Enlightenment is done through a UI, so no prior knowledge of coding languages or editing of config files is needed.
Pro Beautiful interface
Enlightenment offers a beautiful interface with eye candy: it can be themed easily to the user's liking and includes an optional compositor.
Pro Highly customizable, easy customization
There's a ton of settings stacked into a quite compact settings menu that is easy to navigate.
Pro Tiling or stacking
This Wm can handle both.
Pro Havn't found a WM that beats e16 in 20 years.
I've been using e16 for about 20 years and tried quite some other WMs, but always returned back to e16. It's fast, doesn't use much resources, is highly customizable and is rock solid (I cannot remember it crashing). It's combination of simplicity and beauty is unmatched.
The default theme on e16 is kinda disappointing. Try B-42 or Dark-One.
Be careful if you enable Composite. It works flawless, but you can screw your menus when playing around with the transparent settings in the settings menu. Making a backup-copy of your .e16 preferences beforehand might save you some trouble.
Pro Quick mouse-driven menus
Enlightenments menu is easily and quickly accessible by left-clicking anywhere on the desktop.
Pro Fast and good with battery life
Great for laptops.
Pro Virtual desktop previews
Enlightenment allows for virtual desktop previews within its desktop widget for switching desktops within its thumbnails.
Pro Unique workspace set ups
You could have a screen cluttered with panels and another with none.. A feature that is easy with enlightenment.
Pro Lots of themes available
There is a large selection of themes available for the Enlightenment window manager, meaning that customization to one's preference is very straight-forward.
Pro Easy on ressources
Doesn't use much RAM and doesn't hog your CPU.
Pro Lightning fast
Startup of e is lightning fast -- as it is during working with the WM.
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 Sub-menu does not change direction when out of space
When you right-click for the menu in the right part of the screen but there is insufficient space for the cascading menu, you have to interrupt your selecting and move your pointer to touch the right edge of your screen - this manually moves the menu over to the left a little bit, so it has space. If there is a sub-menu, you have to once again move your pointer to the extreme right edge of the screen, for it to move over - and so on, for each level of sub-menu.
Every other OS and app/program in the world today, simply changes direction to where the sub-menus cascade. Whether that be upwards because it's too close to the bottom (we see this in the selection menus in our browsers in forms, or to change sides as we are accustomed to in all programs). This is logical, universal, expected behavior. But not in e17.
Con Not many themes for enlightenment
... and most of them are not really beautiful. For example, a Dark-One on e16 has a simple and clean look and is really beautiful (if you like dark themes).
Con More than a WM now
There are more applications and tools available than on xfce or lxdm.
Con Ugly default theme
The default theme is rather ugly so it's necessary to apply a new theme as soon as you install Enlightenment.
Con Minimal set of utilities
Enlightenment only comes with the bare essentials, meaning there is little that can be done upon first install in comparison to other more fully featured desktops. This does, however, leave all the customization of what apps to install up to the user, which may be a plus to some and is directly comparable to most other bare bones Window managers.
Con e16 has to be compiled from source
e16 packages seem to be no longer available in any distro. So you should at least be able to handle compiler warnings/errors and fix them, which in most cases is installing missing libraries.
Con Backlight and bluetooth can be hard to set up
There seem to be issues with some DRM laptops.
Con Non-tiling
Overlaps and spaces between windows are both pointless.
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.