Cinnamon Applets and Desklets

Cinnamon, the Linux Mint desktop, ships with panels, workspaces, and a desklet layer. These five xlets build on that layer instead of replacing it. Each one takes a surface Cinnamon already has and makes it readable, clickable, or recoverable. They are developed together, documented together, and marketed on one site: xlets.curbsoftware.com.

The desklets

Workspace Grid gives workspaces a stable place on the desktop. Instead of opening Expo or reading a compact panel indicator, the user gets a clickable map whose layout and names can reflect how the machine is organized: development, communication, research, operations. Add, rename, and remove controls handle up to 36 workspaces without touching a settings file.

World Clock keeps a small set of meaningful timezones visible. Each tile has its own name and timezone, so the desktop can show people and places, Vancouver, London, Tokyo, Operations, instead of forcing the user to translate a list of offsets. Zones are searchable, formats are configurable, and fonts fit the tile automatically.

Color Timer Clock puts three cards on the desktop, Clock, Timer, and Chronometer, and lets each card's background color carry meaning. The clock ramps by time of day wrapping over midnight, the timer by time remaining, the chronometer by time elapsed. Text and border colors adapt to stay readable on any background.

The applets

In Panel Workspace Name puts every workspace directly on the panel. Each named button switches to its workspace with one click, and the active workspace uses the panel theme's outlined state, so the current context is identifiable without any custom styling.

Panel Profiles saves a whole desktop layout under a name and brings it back later, exactly. Every profile restores panels, monitor placement, every applet in every zone, their order, and each applet's own settings, with optional desklets included. Loads are transactional: a rollback snapshot is taken first and restored automatically if anything fails.

Under the hood

All five are written in GJS against the Cinnamon APIs and follow the same rules. State is treated as untrusted: a corrupt state file is quarantined and rebuilt rather than loaded. Profile files can hold account names or tokens, so their directories are created mode 0700 and files mode 0600. Nothing phones home, and every setting is exposed through the standard Cinnamon settings UI.