Blur Cinnamon

UUID: BlurCinnamon@klangman
Last edited:
2 months ago 2025-06-21, 15:10
Last commit: [6a580d80] Hungarian translation update for Cinnamon Extensions (#897)

Allows you to blur, colorize, desaturate and adjust the dimming of some Cinnamon Desktop components (i.e. Panels, Popup-menus, Overview, Expo, Desktop image)

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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. The Panels
  4. Applet popup menus (i.e Menu menu, Calendar, etc.)
  5. The Desktop background image

Blurring can also be disabled if you just want a transparent or semi-transparent effect without blurring for Panels, Applet popup menu or the Expo.

Features

  • Gaussian blur algorithm (borrowed from the Gnome extension Blur-my-Shell) with a user configurable intensity
  • Simple blur algorithm (the Cinnamon built-in algorithm) which I would only recommend for very old computers
  • Dimming overlay with user configurable color and intensity (fully-transparent to a solid color)
  • Makes the Panels, Popup menus and the Expo transparent so that the desktop background image effects are visible
  • Allows you to adjust the color saturation of the Cinnamon components. You can reduced saturation all the way down to gray scale
  • You can use general settings for Popups/Panels/Overview/Expo/Background or use unique settings for each

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. The Applet popup menu effects are intended to be used with the Cinnamon (6.4) theme or the Mint-Y dark desktop themes. The effects might work will with some other themes but I have not tested them so the effects might not work out just right. You can try the Mint-Y light themes but it might be hard to read the menu items without some playing around with the settings and the background image. To make sure that the blurred background does not spill over any rounded corners, the popup-menu rounded corners will be disabled when popup-menu effects are enabled. Popup-menu effects are disabled by default in this extension.
  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. Currently, any windows that are positioned such that they overlap with a panel or an popup-menu will not be visible beneath blurred panel/popup-menu as you might expect with a transparent panel/menu. 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 allowing the blur element to appear below all windows rather than above and make the a optional behavior setting.
  4. If you disable effects for any Cinnamon component under the General tab of the setting dialog while any "Use unique effect settings" options are enabled under the other tabs, the components "effect setting" options under the other tabs 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.

Installation

  • Right click on the cinnamon panel and click "System Settings"
  • Click on the "Extensions" icon under the "Preferences" category
  • Click the "Download" tab and then click the "Blur Cinnamon" entry
  • Click the "Install" button on the right and then return to the "Manage" tab
  • Select the new "Blur Cinnamon" entry and then click the "+" button at the bottom of the window
  • Use the "gears" icon next to the "Blur Cinnamon" entry to open the setting window and setup the preferred behavior

Feedback

Please leave a comment here on cinnamon-spices.linuxmint.com or you can create an issue on my Github to give me feedback, make a suggestion or to report any issues you find.

If you like this Cinnamon extension, please give it a "star" here any maybe on my Github repository as well to encourage me to continue working on the project. Thanks!

Credits

Some code was borrowed from the BlurOverview Extension by nailfarmer.

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

The Blur Cinnamon icon was generated by Google Gemini

CHANGELOG

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15 Comments

rado84
rado84-3 days ago
It's good as an idea but still far from a useable variant - for me, at least: • panel blur can not be disabled (bc I don't need blur on the panel) • menu blur can not be enabled AT ALL - that's where I needed some blur to add to my semi-transparent theme (0.4 alpha color).
Kevin Langman
Kevin Langman-3 days ago
Panels effects can be disabled. Open the BlurCinnamon settings (System-settings->Extensions then click the "Configure" button before the BlurCinnamon list entry), on the General tab there is an option to disable panel effects, as well as an option to enable popup menu effects (which is disabled by default). What theme are you using? Not all themes work well with BlurCinnamon, it depends on how the theme decides to setup the panels/menus. BlurCinnamon attempts to override some theme settings to achieve transparency which is needed for the blurred element to be visible behind the panel/menu. But if the theme is using a background that is not one that BlurCinnamon is overriding then the effect will not be visible. If you are still having issues please open an issue in my Github https://github.com/klangman/BlurCinnamon so I can try and address the problem.
Juan-Lutz
Juan-Lutz-2 months ago
Thank you for this beautiful extension. Something many were waiting for.
anik2k06
anik2k06-4 months ago
best applet. but it is under-rated
VictorVolt
VictorVolt-5 months ago
nice extension, do you think it's possible for it to have some sort of hue/saturation option? like, if i have a transparent panel theme with blue outlines, wouldn't need the transparency effect but only a hue type of effect to change the outline colors of the theme. Also a brightness/contrast could also be interesting to make custom themes brighter or darker for panels and maybe for app themes aswell but that might be too far of a stretch, i mean my suggestions might be already too far of a stretch for a extension, but i'm curious to see if it is a possibility
Kevin Langman
Kevin Langman-5 months ago
I think it a good idea, but I think this type of feature belongs in it's own extension. This extension only modifies the theme settings so that the background effects are visible. We should have some extension that allows you to customise a theme. The other option is to use a theme editor and make a revision of the theme with the outline color changes applied.
Eugene
Eugene-5 months ago
A great extension that linux mint was sorely missing. If we could add separate "dimming overlay color" settings for the light and dark themes, it would be great.
Kevin Langman
Kevin Langman-5 months ago
Glad to hear you think it. So you are looking for two setting for the "color overlay" and for the extension to automatically switch which one if active based on if the system is using a light or dark theme?
EverydayLolicon
EverydayLolicon-6 months ago
Really like this addon, but for some reason popup menus show my wallpaper and not what's behind them, in an older version it worked like I would expect it to and didn't show the wallpaper, panel still works well though, is this a bug?
Kevin Langman
Kevin Langman-6 months ago
Glad you like the extension. In the 1st version there were no Applet popup menu effects at all so they would look like what your theme defines. In version 1.2.0 I added the ability to apply effects to just the Main Menu applet. With version 1.3.0 it can apply effects to all applet popup menus. At all times the Main Menu and applets popup menu effects were disabled by default so you had to go to the setting to enable it. If you perfer the Popup menus to have no effects then go to BlurCinnamon settings and disable the "Popup menus" option under the General tab. Hope this helps.
Michael Freeman
Michael Freeman-6 months ago
Absolutely beautiful so far, and a feature that Cinnamon has been missing for way too long! One thing I noticed (and I'm not sure if there's anything that can be done, but I thought I'd let you know) is that the applet menu blur seems to work perfect with everything except Cinnamenu. That applet wants to retain the theme default for some reason.
Kevin Langman
Kevin Langman-3 months ago
Finally had some time to look into the Cinnamenu issue a bit more. See this link for more info... https://github.com/linuxmint/cinnamon-spices-extensions/issues/873
Kevin Langman
Kevin Langman-6 months ago
Ya, Cinnamenu is a bit different in how to opens, making it harder to intercept the open action. I mentioned this issue in the "Limitations" section above. I didn't spend much time yet on getting Cinnamenu to work, but I hope I can get it work with a bit more work.
angelotux
angelotux-6 months ago
wonderful extension
LouitLA
LouitLA-7 months ago
Thanks for the extension! This is a must-have tweak for me