I'm not a fan of Gnome never really was, so I installed Cinnamon from the embrosyn repo. However I noticed some settings seemed to be missing and there was no login window manager available anywhere.
Does anyone know if when we install Cinnamon, certain components do not install on Zorin?
I like the customizations available with Cinnamon like on Linux Mint, but Mint just seems a bit slow compared to Zorin for me.
I also preferred the Embrosyn repo, but the last I checked, it had stopped at Bionic and had not yet given a Focal release file. Has that changed or are you using Zorin OS 15?
I also use (and install) Cinnamon on Zorin. It runs much faster in Zorin OS.
Why a repo ??? I used sudo apt install cinnamon-desktop-environment in the terminal
Mint is only good in a cup of thea, used it in the past 17.x and for met it was unstable. Alot of random freezes and if you asked about it...no one really came with solutions. Yeah pointing fingers at my old nvidia card back then. Even amd users had freezing issues.
Because the Embrosyn repo contained more packages as well as an updated version of Nemo and Cinnamon than the Ubuntu Repository did.
However, for Zorin OS 16, yes, the Ubuntu Main Universe repository i fine.
Unless you want Nemo5. 
I installed it specially.
I'm using Zorin 16 core. I don't remember what version actually installed. I put it on a test pc first to make sure it didn't break anything, but I've already removed it.
Any particular reason some settings weren't there? On your Cinnamon do you have the login window setting?
If using Zorin 16 Core, then the Repo is not needed.
First, remove the Embrosyn repo. I prefer y-ppa-manager, but on Zorin OS you can go to Software & Updates (software-properties-gtk) from the Zorin App Menu. Then the "Other Software" tab. Find Embrosyn repo, click to select, then click the remove button.
For the Base Install of cinnamon:
sudo apt install -y cinnamon-core
For the full Cinnamon and all the trimmings;
sudo apt install cinnamon cinnamon-desktop-environment
Will try it that way.
Any particular reason some settings weren't there? On your Cinnamon do you have the login window setting?
I just double-checked. The Embrosyn repo does indeed NOT include Focal Fossa releases.
I can only assume that the installation you tried did not complete, due to the repo being out of date on the Zorin OS 16 Focal fossa build.
Yes, I have the Login window setting as installing CinnamonD.E. also installs LightDM over GDM (I prefer LightDM.... by far) and I also was sure to install the settings manager for it after:
sudo apt install lightdm-gtk-greeter-settings
Thank You very much and for confirming !!!
I'll redo it and test it again, using the above this time. Zorin is just so much snappier than Mint, I would love to see them just give the option of Cinnamon over Gnome as the default.
100% Endorsed!!
That said, I installed Cinnamon on Zorin OS as an experiment at some point (I don't remember, maybe 9 month ago? Just goes to show how short a time I have actually been using Linux as a whole...) and was blown away by how fast and smooth it runs on Zorin OS.
I just moved back to Linux after about 6 years of using Windows. I started off years ago using Xandros, after trying some different distro's back in the day (nowhere near what is avail. today) I used PCLinuxOS for years and that was the last before going back to Windows. I used KDE, it was simple, easy to customize and it worked.
I've used more than a dozen different distro's and I settled on Zorin, the only thing that I can't get past though is Gnome.... It's always been a problem even back in the day, and it hasn't gotten better. It's always been a convoluted mess,and I find it even worse today. The dev's over there are just as snotty and could not care any less what people actually want.
I'm at the point though, I want a nice stable system that just works. If I want to change something, I want it easy to do either by gui or place a file here. I'm not in the mood any more to have to spend hours tinkering to get one thing to work.
Just a heads up, played around with some things, because it wasn't giving me "login window" like on linux mint. It is because of the lightdm-gtk-greeter-settings.
Found in the Linux Mint forums, If you remove that and lightdm-gtk-greeter... Instead install lightdm, lightdm-settings and slick-greeter. you will then get the login window settings like Linux Mint uses. In there you can control your login background (make sure draw user backgrounds is disabled), as well as just get a setting control for Numlock on boot. and some other settings. No more adding code to get numlock to start or change your background.
Yes, Mint uses Slick-greeter. I personally do not...
Cinnamon Desktop comes with numlockx. Setting it to autostart is a simple addition. You can do this with either lightdm or slick-greeter - which slick-greeter really is lightdm, slightly forked.
But I prefer LightDM because it allows me to tweak things, change things more easily in just one location. And while the Slick-Greeter GUI comes with a couple mroe switches to flip, it lacks a few that Lightdm-gtk-greeter-settings GUI has... Plus, I can just go into the lightdm.conf and change at will, anyway.
It really comes down to personal preference, how much configuring you want to do and what you are familiar with.
For someone who does not care about customizing or configuring and only uses default- then gdm is as good as any.
If they prefer using what thy are used to on Mint, then Slick-greeter is the way to go.
If they are used to how they did it on XFCE, then LightDm is the way to go.