How to Install Mate, Cinnamon, KDE Plasma, and Xfce on Fedora 18

The Fedora 18 distribution ships using Gnome3 in most circumstances as the default desktop environment. There has been a lot of controversy about the direction Gnome3 has gone, which sparked many spin-off projects. If you are not a fan of Gnome3 or are just looking to try other desktop environments for Fedora, here are the directions you’ll need.  Please note, you need to be root to run the following commands.  You may switch to the root account in the terminal by issuing the ‘su’ command or by using ‘sudo’ in front of the commands below if your account is part of the administrators group.

Make Sure Fedora is Up to Date

Open a terminal and run the following command to update Fedora.

yum update

Install the MATE Desktop Environment

http://wiki.mate-desktop.org/download

Open a terminal and run the following command to install the MATE Desktop Environment

yum groupinstall "MATE Desktop"

Install the Cinnamon Desktop Environment

http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/18/html/Release_Notes/sect-Release_Notes-Changes_for_Desktop.html

Open a terminal and run the following command to install the Cinnamon Desktop Environment

yum groupinstall "Cinnamon Desktop"

Install the KDE Plasma Workspace

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/KDE

Open a terminal and run the following command to install the KDE Plasma Workspace

yum install @kde-desktop

Install the Xfce Desktop Environment

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Xfce

Open a terminal and run the following command to install the Xfce Desktop Environment

yum groupinstall XFCE