How To Install Cinnamon Desktop on AlmaLinux 8

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install Cinnamon Desktop on AlmaLinux 8. For those of you who didn’t know, Cinnamon desktop is an intuitive and elegant desktop environment that was initially developed as a fork of the popular GNOME graphical shell, and it is based on the GTK+3 toolkit. It is the default desktop environment on Linux Mint Cinnamon edition. t is the most used desktop environment for workstations and servers like AlmaLinux / Rocky Linux.

This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step installation of the Cinnamon Desktop on an AlmaLinux 8. You can follow the same instructions for CentOS and Rocky Linux.

Prerequisites

• A server running one of the following operating systems: AlmaLinux 8, CentOS, and Rocky Linux 8.
• It’s recommended that you use a fresh OS install to prevent any potential issues
• A non-root sudo user or access to the root user. We recommend acting as a non-root sudo user, however, as you can harm your system if you’re not careful when acting as the root.

Install Cinnamon Desktop on AlmaLinux 8

Step 1. First, let’s start by ensuring your system is up-to-date.

sudo dnf update
sudo dnf install epel-release
sudo dnf config-manager --set-enabled powertools

Step 2. Installing Cinnamon Desktop on AlmaLinux 8.

By default, Cinnamon is not available on the AlmaLinux 8 base repository. Now we run the following command to add repositories for Cinnamon on the AlmaLinux system:

sudo dnf copr enable stenstorp/cinnamon
sudo dnf copr enable stenstorp/lightdm
sudo dnf copr enable stenstorp/icon-themes

Then, run the system update and install Cinnamon Desktop Environment using the following command below:

sudo dnf update
sudo dnf install cinnamon gnome-terminal gnome-system-monitor mint-themes mint-y-theme mint-*-icons

Step 3. Installing LightDM Display Manager.

Run the following command to install LightDM support:

sudo dnf install lightdm-settings slick-greeter-cinnamon

After that Disable GDM and Enable LightDM Display manager:

sudo systemctl disable gdm
sudo systemctl enable lightdm

Finally, we set the default target to graphical UI:

sudo systemctl set-default graphical.target
reboot

Step 3. Accessing Cinnamon on AlmaLinux.

After the successful installation, When you log back on, at the login screen click on the wheel icon and select Cinnamon from the list.

Congratulations! You have successfully installed Cinnamon. Thanks for using this tutorial for installing the Cinnamon Desktop Environment on your AlmaLinux 8 system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Cinnamon website.