Install Cinnamon Desktop on Fedora 45 / 44: Sessions and Display Managers

Cinnamon is one dnf group install away on Fedora, and unlike Pantheon or Deepin it is still packaged in the main repositories for both current releases. The install itself is not the hard part. The choices around it are: which display manager hands you the session, whether you run the X11 or the Wayland session, and how cleanly the whole thing comes back out.

Original content from computingforgeeks.com - post 4565

We ran every step below on two fresh machines with SELinux enforcing: a Fedora 45 Workstation install that already had GNOME and GDM, and a Fedora 44 Cloud Base image with no desktop at all. The two starting points behave differently, and the guide calls out each difference where it shows up.

Find the Cinnamon group

Fedora ships Cinnamon two ways. The cinnamon-desktop group carries the desktop and its default applications. The cinnamon-desktop-environment environment wraps that group with the base X, multimedia, printing, fonts and hardware-support groups. List the environment first:

dnf environment list 2>/dev/null | grep -i cinnamon

One line comes back. The last column says it is not installed yet:

cinnamon-desktop-environment      Cinnamon Desktop                            no

The group does not show in a plain dnf group list. Its metadata marks it as not user-visible, so you need --hidden to see it:

dnf group list --hidden 2>/dev/null | grep -i cinnamon

With the flag, the group appears:

cinnamon-desktop           Cinnamon                                           no

Hidden doesn’t mean unsupported. The group is what the environment pulls in, and installing it by its ID works the same way. Older guides install "Cinnamon Desktop" by name. On current Fedora that is the display name of the environment, while the group itself is just called “Cinnamon”, so install by ID and there is no ambiguity.

The two releases do not ship the same Cinnamon. Fedora 44 carries the stable series. Fedora 45 carries a development snapshot of the next series, which is why its packages have ^unstable in the version string. These are the builds the repositories offered on our machines:

Package	Fedora 44	Fedora 45
cinnamon	6.6.7-7.fc44	6.7.8^unstable-6.fc45
muffin (window manager)	6.6.3-1.fc44	6.7.8^unstable-1.fc45
nemo (file manager)	6.6.3-3.fc44	6.7.8^unstable-1.fc45
cinnamon-session	6.6.4-1.fc44	6.7.5^unstable-1.fc45
slick-greeter	2.2.6-2.fc44	2.2.7-1.fc45
lightdm	1.33.1-2.fc44	1.33.1-7.fc45
xorg-x11-server-Xorg	21.1.24-1.fc44	21.1.24-2.fc45

The last row matters more than it looks. GNOME on Fedora 45 has no X11 session at all, but the Xorg server is still packaged, and the Cinnamon group pulls it in. The X11 Cinnamon session works on both releases.

Install Cinnamon

One command on either release:

sudo dnf group install cinnamon-desktop

How much it pulls depends on what is already there. On the Fedora 45 Workstation machine, where GTK, PipeWire, NetworkManager and Firefox were already installed, the transaction was modest:

Transaction Summary:
 Installing:       310 packages

Total size of inbound packages is 428 MiB. Need to download 428 MiB.
After this operation, 1 GiB extra will be used (install 1 GiB, remove 0 B).

On the Fedora 44 Cloud Base image the same group brought in the whole graphical stack: Xorg, fonts, and the default applications in the group such as Firefox, Thunderbird and Shotwell:

Transaction Summary:
 Installing:      1068 packages

Total size of inbound packages is 1 GiB. Need to download 1 GiB.
After this operation, 4 GiB extra will be used (install 4 GiB, remove 0 B).

If you want the full package set of the spin instead, install the environment with sudo dnf install @cinnamon-desktop-environment. Measured on top of the group, it added 27 packages (162 MiB) on the Workstation machine and 320 packages (868 MiB) on the Cloud Base image. Most of that is printing, multimedia and hardware support. On a laptop you will want it. On a VM you can skip it.

Confirm the shell is in place:

cinnamon --version

Fedora 45 reports the development series:

Cinnamon 6.7.8

Fedora 44 reports Cinnamon 6.6.7. If you are about to move a Cinnamon machine from 44 to 45, that version jump comes with the upgrade. Read the Fedora 44 to 45 upgrade guide first.

Start Cinnamon from GDM on Workstation

The group installs LightDM and slick-greeter, but it does not take over the display manager on a machine that already has one. Workstation keeps GDM:

readlink -f /etc/systemd/system/display-manager.service

The link still points at GDM:

/usr/lib/systemd/system/gdm.service

That’s fine. Log out, click your user, and open the gear in the bottom-right corner before you type the password. GDM lists both Cinnamon sessions next to the GNOME ones:

“Cinnamon” is the X11 session and “Cinnamon (Wayland)” is the Wayland one. Both sessions logged in on the first attempt on Fedora 45 with SELinux enforcing.

Boot to LightDM on a server or minimal install

A machine without a desktop has no display manager to keep, so the LightDM unit the group installs ends up as the display manager. What the machine does not do yet is boot to graphics. Our Cloud Base machine still pointed at the text target after the install:

systemctl get-default
readlink -f /etc/systemd/system/display-manager.service

Both answers show the gap, a text boot target with LightDM already wired up:

multi-user.target
/usr/lib/systemd/system/lightdm.service

On a cloud image, sort out the account before you reboot. cloud-init gives its default user, whatever name you set for it, the full name “fedora Cloud User”, which is what the greeter shows, and it usually leaves that account with SSH keys only and no password. A greeter cannot log in an account that has no password. Give yours one, plus a readable name:

sudo passwd "$USER"
sudo usermod -c "Your Name" "$USER"

Now switch the default target and reboot:

sudo systemctl set-default graphical.target
sudo systemctl reboot

set-default prints the new link before the machine goes down:

Removed '/etc/systemd/system/default.target'.
Created symlink '/etc/systemd/system/default.target' → '/usr/lib/systemd/system/graphical.target'.

The machine comes up on slick-greeter. The session picker is the Cinnamon logo on the user card. On Fedora 44 it offers three entries:

If you read our Pantheon on Fedora guide, you’ll remember that LightDM on Fedora 44 refused the Pantheon session with “Failed to open PAM session” until pam_selinux was told to skip the TTY check. Cinnamon does not hit that. Every Cinnamon session we started through LightDM registered without a TTY name, which is why pam_selinux had nothing to trip on. This is the Wayland session on Fedora 44 with the stock /etc/pam.d/lightdm:

loginctl show-session "$(loginctl show-user "$USER" -p Display --value)" -p Type -p Desktop -p Class -p TTY

The TTY field is empty, with SELinux enforcing:

TTY=
Desktop=cinnamon-wayland
Type=wayland
Class=user

The journal had no pam_selinux errors for LightDM on either release, so leave the PAM file alone.

Swap GDM for slick-greeter

On Workstation you can hand the login screen to slick-greeter if you want the look of the spin. Only one display manager can own display-manager.service, so disable GDM first, then enable LightDM:

sudo systemctl disable gdm
sudo systemctl enable lightdm

systemd swaps the display-manager link:

Removed '/etc/systemd/system/display-manager.service'.
Created symlink '/etc/systemd/system/display-manager.service' → '/usr/lib/systemd/system/lightdm.service'.

Reboot rather than restarting the unit from inside a graphical session. On Fedora 45 slick-greeter came up and logged in to Cinnamon on the first try. It defaults to the X11 session, not the one you last picked in GDM.

One thing changed at the file level on Fedora 45. The LightDM PAM files moved out of /etc:

ls /etc/pam.d/lightdm* /usr/lib/pam.d/lightdm*

Only the vendor copy exists on Fedora 45:

ls: cannot access '/etc/pam.d/lightdm*': No such file or directory
/usr/lib/pam.d/lightdm
/usr/lib/pam.d/lightdm-autologin
/usr/lib/pam.d/lightdm-greeter

PAM reads /etc/pam.d first and falls back to /usr/lib/pam.d. To customise the LightDM PAM stack on Fedora 45, copy the file into /etc/pam.d/ and edit the copy. Package updates then replace the vendor file without touching yours. An old howto that edits /etc/pam.d/lightdm in place will find nothing there.

Choose X11 or Wayland

The session list differs between the releases, and the files behind the greeter menus show why. Fedora 44:

ls /usr/share/xsessions /usr/share/wayland-sessions

Three Cinnamon session files, one of them the 2D fallback:

/usr/share/wayland-sessions:
cinnamon-wayland.desktop

/usr/share/xsessions:
cinnamon2d.desktop
cinnamon.desktop

Fedora 45, on the Workstation machine, with the GNOME sessions alongside:

/usr/share/wayland-sessions:
cinnamon-wayland.desktop
gnome-classic.desktop
gnome.desktop

/usr/share/xsessions:
cinnamon.desktop

cinnamon2d.desktop is the “Software Rendering” session, a fallback for machines whose GPU driver cannot do OpenGL compositing. Fedora 45 no longer ships it, because upstream Cinnamon dropped the separate 2D session and now detects software rendering on its own. If you rely on it, for example in a VM with a basic display adapter, test the normal X11 session on 45 before you upgrade. Both of our VMs used a plain emulated VGA adapter, and the standard sessions ran fine on it.

The Wayland session also changed its label. Fedora 44 calls it “Cinnamon on Wayland (Experimental)”. On Fedora 45 the desktop file reads:

cat /usr/share/wayland-sessions/cinnamon-wayland.desktop

The Name line is what the login screen shows:

[Desktop Entry]
Name=Cinnamon (Wayland)
Comment=This session logs you into Cinnamon
Exec=cinnamon-session-cinnamon --wayland
TryExec=/usr/bin/cinnamon
Icon=
Type=Application

Dropping the label is a signal, not a guarantee. X11 is the session Cinnamon was built around, and the one most applets, desklets and extensions are tested against. The Wayland session started on both releases and brought up the panel and desktop in our test. We did not test screen sharing, multiple monitors or third-party extensions there. Keep X11 as your daily session and treat Wayland as something to try. Both come from the same install, so switching is a logout away.

Verify the session

From a terminal inside the session, check what you are actually running:

echo $XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP $XDG_SESSION_TYPE; cinnamon --version; rpm -q muffin nemo gdm; getenforce

On the Fedora 45 machine, logged in through GDM to the X11 session:

X-Cinnamon x11
Cinnamon 6.7.8
muffin-6.7.8^unstable-1.fc45.x86_64
nemo-6.7.8^unstable-1.fc45.x86_64
gdm-51.0-1.fc45.x86_64
Enforcing

The same check in GNOME Terminal on that desktop:

XDG_SESSION_TYPE is the field that tells you whether you are on X11 or Wayland. The desktop itself looks the same on both releases: a bottom panel with the menu, pinned launchers and a system tray, plus Computer, Home and Trash icons on the desktop.

System Settings in the left column of the menu holds the Cinnamon-specific panels: applets, desklets, extensions, themes and hot corners.

Remove Cinnamon

Put the display manager back before you remove anything. If you remove LightDM while it still owns display-manager.service, the next boot has no login screen. On Workstation, if you swapped to slick-greeter:

sudo systemctl disable lightdm
sudo systemctl enable gdm

On a server that should go back to text mode:

sudo systemctl disable lightdm
sudo systemctl set-default multi-user.target

Log out of Cinnamon, then remove the group from a GNOME session or an SSH login:

sudo dnf group remove cinnamon-desktop

On Fedora 45 Workstation the removal took out 302 of the 310 packages the install had added:

Transaction Summary:
 Removing:         302 packages

After this operation, 1 GiB will be freed (install 0 B, remove 1 GiB).

GDM, GNOME Shell and both GNOME sessions were untouched, and disk use on / dropped from 8,416 MiB to 7,548 MiB. Of the eight packages left, four are orphans that dnf will name:

dnf repoquery --unneeded

It names four packages:

ibus-panel-0:1.5.35~rc1-1.fc45.x86_64
ibus-xinit-0:1.5.35~rc1-1.fc45.noarch
libdbusmenu-0:16.04.0-32.fc45.x86_64
libdbusmenu-gtk3-0:16.04.0-32.fc45.x86_64

sudo dnf autoremove clears them. The other four, gtk2, ibus-gtk2, libcanberra-gtk2 and libreoffice-x11, are not flagged as unneeded, so autoremove leaves them in place. On the Fedora 44 Cloud Base image the removal was a full reversal. All 1068 packages came out, the package count went back to 539, its pre-install figure, and disk use fell from 3,895 MiB to 1,646 MiB.

If you have not installed Fedora yet, the Fedora Cinnamon spin installs this desktop directly, with no GNOME underneath. On a machine you already run, the group install above is the shorter path and the easier one to undo. For other desktops on the same base, see the KDE Plasma, Xfce and Budgie guides. The Debian equivalent is in Cinnamon on Debian.