nullog

My vacation[summer, 2013] ended and I continue to evaluate and tinker with plans to create a standardized deployment across my laptops; I am finding what I once thought was a sure thing isn’t. I currently run OpenBox on my Arch install, my desire to keep minimal system along how much I enjoy many aspects of Crunch Bang I thought OpenBox would be the clear winner. Yet Cinnamon is starting to emerge as a strong contender, I am starting to grow fond of the environment. I wish Cinnamon was an independant project and not a vital cog of Mint Linux. Without such seperation, lack of documantion and independant development cycle the project lacks transparency leaving the UX at the whim of the Mint dev team.

Cinnamon is a Mint project and it’s the implementation of Mint’s vision and needs for a desktop.[^…1]
Clement Lefebvre

Electing to use Cinnamon would be taking the easy way out along with the baggage associated with it. Cinnamon is a derivative of GNOME, which has a plethora of settings not always exposed to the user. One such setting is natural scrolling, I have natural scrolling correctly configure in xorg.conf{.d}

Section "InputClass"
   ...
   Option   "VertScrollDelta"     "-111"
   Option   "HorizScrollDelta"    "-111"
   ...
EndSection

Neither GNOME nor Cinnamon would honor this system wide defualt setting, so some tweaking in in order. I could use dconf-editor to follow the bread crumbs along the schema path below to alter the key value. A much simpler and dare I say elegant solution exist:

gsettings set org.gnome.settings-daemon.peripherals.touchpad natural-scroll "true"

[^…1]: It is perfectly acceptable for Mint to spend their resources on improving Cinnamon for Mint. Speaking only as an end user not using a Mint distro, if I elect to use Cinnamon I would personally feel more comfortable with my choice if development priority was given to improve the project overall and not specifically Mint.

It’s in its design to be compatible with Linux as a whole though, so for it not work or not to be suitable on any distribution is a perfectly valid concern and we do consider it a bug.