Cinnamon 1.4 has been released and has received cool new features this time.’Expo’ & ‘Scale’ features add eyecandy to your desktop experience, and there are lot of other improvements in usability as well. Cinnamon 1.4 is already there in Mint 12 repositories. Ubuntu users can use the PPA below.
You can use the PPA to install Cinnamon 1.4 on Ubuntu -
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gwendal-lebihan-dev/cinnamon-stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install cinnamon
About a week ago while roaming around, i found this very interesting post on Mint Blog that showed a very new project that is aimed at improving the Linux Desktop experience. They are putting a lot into this project to make it more stable, eyecandy and user-friendly. It was mentioned on the blog that they started patching existing alternatives such as Gnome Shell, used MATE and MGSE to provide an easier transition away from Gnome 2, but without being able to truly offer an alternative that was better than Gnome 2. Both MATE and Gnome Shell are promising projects but MATE’s ultimate goal is to replicate Gnome 2 using GTK+ and Gnome Shell doesn’t provide what is needed in a desktop. So for these reasons they’re designing a new desktop called Cinnamon, which leverages new technology and implements their vision. See for yourself -
The Ubuntu 11.10 default wallpapers have been selected from the 44 shortlisted community wallpaper list. The 14 selected are really cool and will add more spice to the Ubuntu Oneiric desktops. The link below will let you download a tarball that contains all the wallpapers right away !
GNOME 3.2 has been released and is the first follow-up release to its ground-breaking GNOME 3.0. It has undergone a major redesign and now has the user interface for the next generation of the desktop. From 3.2, GNOME is refining the project and starting to introduce new, modern GNOME applications that will deeply integrate with the GNOME 3 experience and which are designed for modern users.
Cairo-Dock is a unified dock-like interface for your desktop. Besides a cool dock, it provides a taskbar, and many applets that can be placed either inside the dock or on your desktop, at your convenience ! It is highly customizable and comes with a lot of ready-to-use themes. 
This PPA will install cairo dock in your Ubuntu desktops (yes ! 11.10 also).
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:cairo-dock-team/ppa
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install cairo-dock
Kubuntu 11.10 Beta 2 just released has the latest KDE software including KDE 4.7.1 Plasma Workspaces and Applications. This release has undergone many changes regarding the latest updates, DE improvements and application updates. A few of them are listed below. This release is stable than the previous one but yet again we recommend you either use LiveCD or use Virtual machine for the testing purpose and wait till October for its final release.
Ubuntu 11.10 Beta 2 has been released and is ready for downloads. This release has Unity based upon the Gnome 3 desktop, Ubuntu Software Center has been redesigned and many applications have been upgraded to their latest stable versions. Curious fanatics of Ubuntu may run upgrades to get their beta 2 right away but we still recommend to wait for the stable release for production machines and test this one in VMs.
Banshee Media Player as we know it is the default media player for Ubuntu 11.04. A new version of Banshee is out now. Banshee 2.2 is the culmination of six months’ work by 35 developers, 38 translators and dozens of bug reporters and testers. It is a stable release, the successor to Banshee 2.0. It will be available in updates or via official PPA i.e ppa:banshee-team/ppa soon enough.
