linuxmint/Cinnamon — pull request #1388 by hguemar (2012-11-21 12:33:05+00:00)
Title: bugfix: cinnamon-settings doesn't start when user has defined python customization file

If you have defined a ~/.pythonrc.py, the following statement doesn't work anymore: "from user import home". Besides, this is a bad practice and user module has been removed in python3. This issue is always reproducible.

You can either use pyxdg, for instance a drop-in alternative would be "from xdg.BaseDirectory import _home as home" (but that adds a pyxdg dependency to cinnamon-settings) or use standard library os.path.expanduser("~") which is garanteed to work on all platforms supported by Python.

Since i don't which is Cinnamon dependencies policy, i favored the latter solution.