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How can I Install Cinnamon 5.4 on Debian 11? I must download it from GitHub or from a repo?

Paolo
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1 Answers1

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At time of writing, the cinnamon package has the following versions:

  • 3.2.7-4 (stretch/oldoldstable)
  • 3.8.8-1 (buster/oldstable)
  • 4.8.6-2+deb11u1 (bullseye/stable)
  • 5.2.7-4 (bookworm/testing)
  • 5.2.7-4 (sid/unstable)
  • 5.4.8-1 (experimental)

You may be able to install cinnamon 5.4 from the experimental repository.

Before you do that there are lots of this fairly serious warning:

Experimental is used for packages which are still being developed, and with a high risk of breaking your system. It's used by developers who'd like to study and test bleeding edge software. Users shouldn't be using packages from there, because they can be dangerous and harmful even for the most experienced people.

cinnamon has lots of dependencies. Usually, you can expect experimental's dependencies to exist in unstable, so you should be running an unstable system.

If you are already happily running an unstable system, and understand the high risk of breaking your system, then use experimental by adding the following to /etc/apt/sources.list:

deb http://deb.debian.org/debian experimental main

Then install cinnamon with:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install -t experimental cinnamon

If you want to track cinnamon in experimental (always take the latest experimental version), then add this to /etc/apt/preferences:

Package: cinnamon
Pin: release a=experimental
Pin-Priority: 800

I would advise against running anything from experimental if this is your main desktop. That's especially true for something as fundamental as a desktop environment.

Instead, consider why you want cinnamon 5.4.

If you simply don't like running year-old software, then perhaps Debian stable isn't for you. The Debian world would say "Don't suffer from Shiny New Stuff Syndrome".

Ubuntu release every ~6 months, that's more frequent than Debian. Perhaps that is good enough for you. Ubuntu Jammy (release in April 2022) is running the same version as Debian testing (5.2.7-4).

Debian testing stays a few days behind bleeding-edge (until release cycles slow things down). Debian testing is currently running cinnamon 5.2 which is at-least a 5.x release. If 5.4 works great, it may be only a few days before it is uploaded to unstable and then a few days more until it migrates to testing. If 5.4 is buggy AF or doesn't integrate well with everything else, then it might take longer (but in that case, you probably don't want to be punishing yourself anyways).

But if cinnamon 5.4 implements new functionality and you want to test how your software behaves in that new environment, then an unstable/experimental build sounds totally appropriate as long as you're willing to suffer through possible breakages.

Stewart
  • 13,677