Mint is no different from any other Linux distro in that it lets you customize your experience to just the way you like. The Cinnamon desktop environment—Mint’s default, in so far as it has one—has some of the most versatile options available. Let’s go over some of the ways you can customize Linux Mint Cinnamon.

Where to Find Cinnamon Desktop Appearance Settings

Cinnamon allows you to radically change what you see on the desktop with just a few clicks. You access these functions through the menu, which you open by clicking the Mint icon in the bottom right of your screen and then navigating to “Preferences” and then finding “System settings.”

You can also simply type whatever you need into the search bar at the top, which I prefer as it’s a lot faster. Either way, you’ll come to the system settings, and you’ll find all you need in the top, under “Appearance.”

We’ll go over all these in turn, though note you can also access each one directly through typing their name into the menu’s search function, as well.

Choose a New Background

First up is changing the background of your desktop, which you may also know as the wallpaper. You can do this both through the menu as well as right-clicking anywhere on the desktop and selecting “Change desktop background.”

Either way, you get to the backgrounds menu. Linux Mint comes with a lot of wallpapers to choose from, both the standard ones as well as the ones included in different versions (the girls’ names in my screenshot below).

You can also add your own. The default only grabs from your main “pictures” folder, so if you keep your wallpapes pictures elsewhere, you need to change it. Click on the “plus” symbol at the bottom of the screen, then navigate to the folder you want to add.

Whatever picture you want as a background, just click it and it will become your wallpaper. It should change almost immediately.

Choose New Animations With Effects

Next is the Effects screen, which allows you to change the animated effects around opening and closing menus, dialog boxes, and windows. You can toggle each of these on or off, as well as change what effect you see.

I recommend you mess around with these settings until you find ones you like. Especially the style dropdown box gives you a lot of options. You can fade effects in or out, or even switch of effects completely.

Note that you can also tweak all these functions in a more detailed way through the Customize window at the top of the screen. You can determine how long effects last, and further specify the type of effect shown.

You can have some fun experimenting if you’re bored, too.

Pick a Snazzy Font

You can also change the fonts in Linux Mint using the Font Selection screen.

Mint allows for different fonts in different places and lets you change them at will, which is great. I stick to the defaults (for a writer I’m surprisingly not very picky about fonts), but there are hundreds of options to choose from.

The bottom half of the screen also has some options for when you have trouble reading the screen. You can change the size of letters through changing the “text scaling factor” and can improve legibility through trying different options under the “hinting” and “antialiasing” headings. These last two can help if letters look blurry—a common issue when running Mint on older machines.

Change Up the Entire Theme

In the Themes screen you can change the appearance of the desktop as a whole, as well as window borders, icons, and your mouse pointer, among other things.

I was surprised by the amount of options for everything, with multiple themes for every setting—icons alone have dozens of options. I also like how you can’t just change the overall theme, but even the buttons on windows.

If somehow you want even more themes, you can click on the “Add/remove” button on the top of the screen to find community-made themes.

The “Settings” menu mostly controls how the scrollbar behaves, as well as letting you set the appearance of buttons in certain menus.

Get Productive With Desklets

You can also add desklets to your desktop. These are small mini-apps that give you an overview of what a program is doing, or maybe add some convenience, like a clock. You access them through the desklet program, either via the menu or by right-clicking anywhere on the desktop.

There are currently only three default desklets you can install, but you can download scores of others. There are some that can monitor system stats, plugins for popular apps like Google Calendar, to a desklet that gives you a random Persian poem each day.

Desklets are great if you want at-a-glance information on your desktop, though I have to say the experience very much depends on the individual desklet. The good ones work very well, the not-so-good ones are far less useful. If you like the idea of desklets, I recommend you experiment to find ones you like.

Add and Remove Desktop Icons

You can also add, remove, and rearrange desktop icons. To do so, right-click anywhere on your desktop and choose “Customize.”

The first screen you see will let you change how the default icons are shown. You can sort them horizontally as well as vertically, change their order, things of that nature.

At the bottom of that screen, you can click on “Desktop settings” and change which icons are shown.

These settings are nice as they give you the choice between an empty desktop, or one that lets you control things without submenus. Either way, you can change all this at will.

Linux Mint is a highly malleable distro and the Cinnamon desktop makes it very easy to tailor your desktop environment through just a few clicks. If there’s anything on your desktop you wish were a little different, changing it is easy. I also like it as a way to kill some time as there are so many things to experiment with.