I guess you mean Cinnamon, Linux Mint is the distro (and it also comes with MATE and XFCE variants).
Cinnamon started as a fork of GNOME 3, for a while Linux Mint was shipping GNOME 3 + MGSE (Mint GNOME Shell Extensions)… GNOME is configurable through extensions, but due to frictions with the GNOME team it made more sense to fork.
I guess you mean Cinnamon, Linux Mint is the distro (and it also comes with MATE and XFCE variants).
Cinnamon started as a fork of GNOME 3, for a while Linux Mint was shipping GNOME 3 + MGSE (Mint GNOME Shell Extensions)… GNOME is configurable through extensions, but due to frictions with the GNOME team it made more sense to fork.