Applets, extensions, actions, and desklets made explicitly for Cinnamon are no longer compatible with GNOME Shell.

As the distinctive factor and preeminent desktop environment for Linux Mint, Cinnamon has generally received favorable coverage by the press, in particular for its ease of use and gentle learning curve.

The elimination of these basic features was unacceptable to the developers of distributions such as Mint and Ubuntu, which are geared to users who wanted interfaces that are familiar and easy-to-use.

[2] To overcome these differences, the Linux Mint team initially set out to develop extensions for GNOME Shell to replace the abandoned features.

Beginning with version 1.2, released in January 2012, the window manager of Cinnamon is called Muffin, which was originally a fork of GNOME 3's Mutter.

Nemo was created in response to disapproval of some upstream changes in Nautilus 3.6 that significantly altered the functionality and user interface of the file manager.

Further improvements in later versions include a desktop grid, wildcard support in file searches, multi-process settings daemon, desktop actions in the panel launcher, separate processes for desktop handling and file manager in Nemo; an additional desktop panel layout option that offers a more modern looking theme and grouped windows; improved naming for duplicate applications in the menu (i.e. Flatpak vs. deb packages), pinned files in Nemo, touchpad gestures, bulk file rename of multiple files and folders using bulky, customizable context menu items in Nemo called "Actions", the ability to display user profile pictures on the panel, improved multi-monitor support in regard to open windows, better visual indicators in the system notifications tray for VPN connections, and an emphasis on performance improvements.

This is the first release of Cinnamon to include an experimental Wayland session implementation, along with fractional scaling and AVIF background image support, among other improvements.

Themes can customize the look of aspects of Cinnamon, including but not limited to the menu, panel, calendar and run dialog.

[18] Desklets are miniature applications that one can place and run on the desktop, providing quick access to information and functionality.

Extensions can modify the functionalities of Cinnamon, such as providing an alternative menu to launch applications or altering the look of the Alt+Tab ↹ window switcher.