Cinnamon along with Linux Mint offers you the traditional GNOME 2 layout that is built from GNOME Shell giving a much more modern foundation. Cinnamon 1.2 has many new cool features, the desktop effect, desktop layouts, new configuration tool, the applets,and much more. A host of changes, bug fixes and improvements went into this release. Let us find out what all...

The new Cinnamon 1.2 features the following

• Desktop Effects : now user has the ability to define fancy animations or to turn effects OFF altogether.
• 2 new animation plugins added : Fade,to change the opacity of windows & Scale, to change their dimension
• 30 new transition styles
• Added support for the most common desktop layouts:Traditional layout,Flipped layout and Classic layout 
• Easier Customization with a  new configuration tool called “Cinnamon Settings” and additional configuration options 
• 5 new applets by default: Accessibility,Recent documents,Removable drives,Trash and Display (XrandR monitor control)
• An enhanced Main Menu with easy and improved searching capabilities.
• Cinnamon  no longer compatible with Gnome Shell themes. 
• Newly opened windows focused by default 
• Closing window does not trigger overview as before

For more details, see Cinnamon 1.2