Fedora 18 was released today, and among the promised new features are alternatives to the GNOME desktop in the form of MATE and Cinnamon. Fedora users who dislike the latest versions of GNOME may be disappointed to learn that it's still the only desktop environment that is installed by default—MATE and Cinnamon have to be installed separately.

These alternative desktop environments could already be installed through the command line on Fedora 17. Promising support for both MATE and Cinnamon in official release notes and press announcements might have led some to hope that the interfaces would be included right up front. But with the full install DVDs going up to 4.4GB and MATE alone adding another 104MB, Fedora maintainers decided not to bulk up that download any further.

Thus, you still have to do some extra work to get an alternative to GNOME. Here's how to do it...Read more at Ars Technica