I've reading about about the Cinnamon Desktop through this Q&A:
How do I install the Cinnamon Desktop?
I've also been looking at the various possible various flavours of Ubuntu such as Unity/Gnome-shell and KDE:
My concern is about running applications on Cinnamon - I'm fairly new to linux and am unsure about running software - especially about potentially mixing different software that may have been targeted at different desktops.
Can I run a Kubuntu or Unity applications in Cinnamon or do I have to get specific Cinnamon only applications? For example, KOffice/Libreoffice, Okular/evince etc.
Any help understanding what potential impacts such as extra software I may need to use or additional configuration to make sure that various different software behave and look like each other would be gratefully received.
There is no Cinnamon specific applications except cinnamon extensions and themes , Since cinnamon is a fork of gnome3 you can run all gtk apps without any problem .you can even run qt apps without any considerable performance lost,
please note that interface of application depends on the toolkit (usually qt or gtk)used for create it
If you only want general application, that not depend of the desktop, thats is possible without any problem... There are a little decrease of the performance to show gtk or qt application on gnome shell or Cinnamon, but really little, you can not see any difference.
If you want to use desktop applications of others different desktop environments, this will be possible using applets, desklets, and extensions if there are an equivalent one on Cinnamon, but in general can not be possible, as for example you can not use actually a global menu on cinnamon.