MATE desktop not offered by Fedora 42 greeter

[Robert Nichols]

In my newly upgraded Fedora 42 VM, the greeter offers me only "GNOME" and "GNOME Classic" even though dnf reports:
     Package "mate-desktop-1.28.2-4.fc42.x86_64" is already installed.

I tried reinstalling mate-desktop, but that did not help. How can I get MATE desktop to work?

[Robert Nichols]

FWIW, the upgrade was from a Fedora 41 VM in which my MATE desktop was working just fine.

[Tim]

On Thu, 2025-03-06 at 22:46 -0600, Robert Nichols via users wrote:
> In my newly upgraded Fedora 42 VM, the greeter offers me only "GNOME"
> and "GNOME Classic" even though dnf reports:
>      Package "mate-desktop-1.28.2-4.fc42.x86_64" is already installed.

Which greeter and desktop manager are installed?  There was a
recommendation to use lightdm with Mate (I don't know if that is, or
was, valid advice).

Too late, now, but before doing release updates, it might be worth
doing a list of installed RPMs.  Just to give you some clues to look
for if the update throws a spanner in the works.

Just looking at my Fedora 40 box:

rpm -qa *greeter*
slick-greeter-2.0.6-1.fc40.x86_64
slick-greeter-mate-2.0.6-1.fc40.noarch

rpm -qa *dm*|sort
and some manual pruning of irrelevant packages lists these
lightdm-1.32.0-10.fc40.x86_64
lightdm-gobject-1.32.0-10.fc40.x86_64
lightdm-settings-2.0.5-1.fc40.noarch

I suspect Fedora 41 was similar, and 42 might be.  Is 42 released yet? 
I thought it's not quite yet.  You might get better answers on the test
list where people have been playing with it.

When I installed 40 it was from the server spin (the only one I could
get to boot), which is intended that it can run headless, so no desktop
manager was pre-installed as far as I'm aware, and did a "dnf update"
then a "dnf groupinstall MATE Desktop" afterwards.

See if "dnf groupinstall MATE Desktop" offers some more packages you
don't already have.

[Patrick O'Callaghan]

On Thu, 2025-03-06 at 22:46 -0600, Robert Nichols via users wrote:
> In my newly upgraded Fedora 42 VM, the greeter offers me only "GNOME" and "GNOME Classic" even though dnf reports:
>      Package "mate-desktop-1.28.2-4.fc42.x86_64" is already installed.
>
> I tried reinstalling mate-desktop, but that did not help. How can I get MATE desktop to work?

F42 is as yet unreleased. You should post to the Fedora Test list,
which deals with this kind of thing.

poc