Blur Cinnamon

A Cinnamon extension to Blur, Dim, Colorize, Desaturate and make transparent parts of the Cinnamon Desktop.

Cinnamon components you can effect (currently):

1. The overview
2. The Expo
3. Panels
4. Panel applet popup menus (i.e Menu menu, Calendar, etc.)
5. Desktop background
6. Notifications
7. Alt-Tab (Coverflow & Timeline) switchers
8. Panel Tooltips
9. Appication Windows

Features

1. Gaussian blur algorithm (borrowed from the Gnome extension Blur-my-Shell) with a user configurable intensity
2. Simple blur algorithm (the Cinnamon built-in algorithm) which I would only recommend for very old computers
3. Dimming overlay with user configurable color and intensity (fully-transparent to a solid color)
4. Makes the Panels, Popup menus and the Expo transparent so that the desktop background image effects are visible
5. Allows you to adjust the color saturation of the background overlay. You can reduced or completely desaturated (i.e gray scale)
6. You can use general settings for Popups/Panels/Overview/Expo or use unique settings for each
7. You can blur, dim and desaturate the desktop background image
8. The desktop background image effects can be configured to only apply when the desktop is not in focus

Requirements

This extension requires Cinnamon 6.0 or better (i.e Mint 21.3 or better).

If you have installed any of the following Cinnamon extensions, you should disable them before enabling Blur Cinnamon:

• Transparent panels
• Transparent panels reloaded
• Blur Overview

Using any of the above with Blur Cinnamon may have some odd side effects that would require a Cinnamon restart to resolve.

Limitations

1. Currently, any windows that are moved such that they overlap with a panel will not be visible beneath the panel as you might expect with a transparent panel. This is because the blur effect is applied to a user interface element that floats above all windows just like the panel floats above the windows. At some point I hope to look into making the blur element appear below all windows rather than above.
2. The Applet popup-menu effects works for all the applets that I have tested except "Cinnamenu". Cinnamenu is preventing other code from receiving the "open-state-changed" event which BlurCinnamon uses to know when to apply popup-menu theme setting and when to resize and show the blur background element. This issue is fixed in the latest Cinnamenu from Fredcw GitHub but you will need to manually fix the current Cinnamon Spices version of Cinnamenu (see here)
3. If you disable effects for a compoenent under the General tab of the setting dialog while the "Override the generic effect settings" option is enabled under the component tab, the components "effect setting" options under the component tab will still be visible, but changing those setting will have no effect until you re-enable the component under the General tab. Ideally those effect setting would only be visible when the component is enabled under the general tab but Cinnamon setting support is a bit limited in this way.
4. When using "Application Window" effects or the "Focused window backlight effect", the Blur Cinnamon effect actor size does not immediatly follow the windows size. This casues a split second where the Blur Cinnamon effect actor is parly visible outside the window bounds when tiling, maximizing, unmaximizing or expanding the window size. Hopfully I can find a better way of tracking the window size in the future.
5. If the "Compiz Windows Effect" extension is used with "Application window" effects applied to some window, the Blur Cinnamon actor will "wobble" along with the rest of the window elements. This means the windows blurred background will not match the background image while the "Compiz Windows Effect" animation is in action.
6. This extension currently does not work under Wayland, it only works under X11. The extension automatically detects wayland and disables most of the features of the extension.

Installation

This extension is also available on Cinnamon Spices. It can be installed directly from within Cinnamon using the "Extensions" application under the "System Settings".

Blur Cinnamon on Cinnamon Spices

For the latest cutting edge development version, follow these instructions to install manually:

1. Clone the repo (or Download the latest repo by clinking on the green "code" button above then click "Download ZIP")

   git clone https://github.com/klangman/BlurCinnamon.git
   

2. If you downloaded a ZIP, decompress the zip into a directory of your choice

   unzip ~/Downloads/BlurCinnamon-main.zip
   

3. Change directory to the cloned repo or the decompressed ZIP file

4. Link the "BlurCinnamon@klangman" directory into the "~/.local/share/cinnamon/extensions/" directory

   ln -s $PWD/BlurCinnamon@klangman ~/.local/share/cinnamon/extensions/BlurCinnamon@klangman
   

5. Open the Cinnamon Extensions application (Menu->Preferences->Extensions)

6. Select the "Blur Cinnamon" entry and then click the "+" button at the bottom of the Extensions window

7. Use the "gears" icon to open the Blur Cinnamon setting window and setup the preferred behavior

Feedback

Feel free to open an issue here in my Github repo if you want to make a suggestion or report an issue.

If you like this Cinnamon extension, "star" this Github repository and its Cinnamon-spices [page](Extensions : Blur Cinnamon : Cinnamon Spices to encourage me to continue working on the project. Thanks!

Credits

Some code was borrowed from the BlurOverview Extension by nailfarmer.

The Gaussian and rounded corner effect code was borrowed from the Gnome Blur my shell extension by Aurélien Hamy.

The Blur Cinnamon icon was generated by Google Gemini