That seems like an overly harsh characterization. Lots of people didn’t like where GNOME 3 went, and there were various efforts to preserve the older way of working - e.g. MATE by working off of GNOME 2, and Cinnamon by working with GNOME 3 to make it more GNOME 2-like. The fact that the Linux Mint project drove Cinnamon isn’t really the same as “not meant to be used outside Mint”.
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I am sorry if you feel like it is “harsh” but it just the way it is. Basically Cinnamon exists to set Mint apart from other distributions. Mint has got a very narrow focus that is the desktop with that look and feel, those components, those applications. Cinnamon does not exist to provide “the community” with a “generic alternative” to Gnome.
Now, if there was a Pippo distribution that developed XFCE as internal project for its own needs, probably I would say the same, if you like XFCE probably you should use Pippo distribution instead of Fedora. But XFCE is a “generic alternative”, unlike Cinnamon, so it makes no difference what distribution you use with it.
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Cinnamon works fine in fedora with minimal patching.
Clem doesn’t share your opinion.
IMO you appear to be some sort of gnome fanboy.
I don’t understand what my “opinion” should be.
I am just stating the obvious.
About Gnome, again, Fedora will have two “workstations” that are Gnome and Plasma, that is because those are the DE where the development is done. Anything else is either “legacy” or fills a sort of “niche”, like Cinnamon.
Why do Fedora “spins” exist?
I don’t know. When I tried some, I found them painful compared to “workstation”.
I guess it is “why not”.
Speaking of the whole Gnome 2 vs Gnome 3 story, it is pretty much obvious Mate doesn’t make much sense, for three reasons, that are the same for the similar DE. Too few man power. Being forever “retro” or “vintage”. Overlapping with XFCE or LXQT (and Cinnamon BTW). Plus, again if you want the traditional desktop you have got Plasma so why bother.
Well, I am not a user of alternatives, because the DE I liked the most was Fluxbox, but as it does not support Wayland, I switched to Gnome.
For Fedora, I would recommend to install Workstation and pick any DE I would like and install it on top of it. This way I would have all the components installed and working and with the extra DE I would only change the looks of the distro, especially if memory or disk space are not a problem.
I do not think that users could not use Cinnamon for day to day work on Fedora. They just need to be aware that a few people test it and report bugs.
The concept of replacing X-windows with Wayland is a good one, however many have failed to grasp the full breadth and depth of the task. X-Windows evolved over decades and may not be well documented so anyone using Wayland is a defacto QA tester. Most of the issues reported on this forum recently have involved NVidia or Wayland. If enough defacto QA testers submit a sufficient number of detailed bug reports, Wayland will become highly reliable.
Cinnamon has been “slow” to adapt Wayland and I, for one, am happy to allow those pushing for unilateral use of Wayland to press on as defacto QA folks.
Interesting. That sounds like a terrible idea to me, haha. Desktops interfere with each other quite a bit, plus you’d end up with lots of unused packages, probably more startup services and SELinux denials, etc. And if you uninstall GNOME afterwards, you would just end up with the same packages as the spin… but with possibly a slightly messed up ~/.config folder.
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I wouldn’t recommend that, GDM could conflict with the DE’s screen saver/locker.
Ah yes, that is another reason to use a spin.
I’m not sure that’s really an issue. From what I understand, GDM is primarily a login and session manager responsible for starting user sessions. Once the session starts, control over the screensaver and screen locker is handled by the desktop environment itself (e.g., KDE, XFCE, GNOME). GDM doesn’t actively interfere after login.
If a conflict does occur, it would likely point to a bug or misconfiguration, and in that case, it should be reported. Have you experienced such issues yourself, or is this more of a theoretical concern?
If someone believes that using GDM would interfere with other desktops, they probably do not understand what Linux should be about. In Linux, the philosophy is a philosophy of choice and selection.
If you suggest, @leigh123linux, that you cannot use GDM with other desktops, you suggest to avoid scenarios where there are multiple users on a computer and they all have a different desktop preference. Does it mean, they cannot use it? No. They can use it just fine. GDM is responsible for loging in the users and starting the session, anything else is not part of GDM any more.
Can there be problems? Sure. And probably, there will be. Why? Because Gnome and KDE both get a proper amount of testing, other desktops do not. However, there are still people who maintain them and who would be willing to correct an issue if you report it to them.
Therefore, new users probably just should pick up Workstation and get used to it, look around in the system, read a bit about their choices, and when they advance, they will be free to pick up what serves them best.
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I’m sorry, but this reads to me like “I have/had a bad experience with Fedora Cinnamon spin so it is bad spin which has issues for everyone"
Other and myself already stated that we don’t have any (real) issues with the Cinnamon spin so your negativity and opinion seems a bit biased 
I always do something similar, but my base is the i3 Spin, and from there I install all other desktops, usually for testing stuff, since i3wm is my main environment
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One conflict I know of is that GNOME cannot lock the screen without GDM. I have experienced certain display managers not starting certain desktops before, but as you said these are probably just silly, fixable bugs.
But things like theming and the overall look and feel is a factor too. If the only desktop you’re using is LXQt, then GDM should work fine, but it doesn’t really fit in with the desktop’s look.
Another reason to use a spin is for lightweight use. A Raspberry Pi 3 with 1GB ram struggles to even start GNOME, and this probably applies to GDM to an extent too. Perhaps a bit of an extreme example, but if you’re trying to revive an old computer or play around in a VM on a medium-speed machine, it will just be nicer to use LXQt from the beginning rather than start with GNOME.
Sure, you are totally right. However, in the case you have described, we are talking about a specific case that does not allow using the Workstation-as-a-base-and-anything-on-top-of-it approach. With old laptops, the situation usually is that either you use a lightweight spin and tolerate its flaws, or you cannot use them anymore.
With a powerful machine, on the other hand, you still could be using anything lightweight and yet retain the solidness of the base.
Try KDE, you’ll never look back
That gets crufty. I like to keep it to one DE per installation.
You are ok to like just one DE per installation. I do that, too. However I do not see anything crafty or potentionally bad when people want to use a unique DE for each of the computer accounts. I find it a totally plausible use case.
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You’d be more brave than me doing that 
I like the idea of a personal computer; one-computer, one-user, one-DE on the assumption you’d probably be being productive within other apps and not needing to switch DEs
I also have enough fun issues in Linux (like copy/paste) to not want to guess if an unrelated DE install might be involved.
I used Gnome 4x with Mate Desktop while some changes in settings was making changes in the other DE’s settings because they have been used in both DE’s (compatible). This can cause unexpected issues.
An other point would be, if you need help here it is easier to reproduce a issue if you just use the default spins/editions we do offer. Otherwise you will be on your own to find errors which others not get confronted with.