Cinnamon

Cinnamon is a traditional and modern desktop environment: traditional desktop metaphor as Gnome 2, LXDE or Xfce, with very good graphical and fonctional features. It is forked from Gnome Shell and developed for Linux Mint. It is provided for Gentoo as a Gnome package: gnome-extra/cinnamon.

Without Systemd
Cinnamon works great without systemd. For that, select a profile without Gnome, as this one: default/linux/amd64/13.0/desktop (platform and version can be different). To get your profiles list:

And to set your profile:

where n is profile number.

Also, you need to follow Gentoo Without Systemd wiki page indications.

With Systemd
For Cinnamon with systemd you can select a profile as default/linux/amd64/13.0/desktop/gnome/systemd (again, platform and version can be different).

Installing
Of course, Xorg must be first installed for Cinnamon to work.

Cinnamon needs some USE flags:  and. You can add them in your make.conf:

You also can set them just for Cinnamon install, see below.

For Cinnamon, and other applications to be translated, also add your language in make.conf:

Cinnamon also needs other packages to work properly: x11-libs/gtk+extra, gnome-extra/polkit-gnome and x11-drivers/xf86-video-modesetting.

So, let's go to install!

If you added  and   to make.conf:

And if you didn't:

Services
Xorg server & Cinnamon need dbus & consolekit services, Cinnamon needs NetworkManager:

And if you want to run these services before restart:

Sudo
For an ordinary user to reboot or shutdown, we need sudo and some settings, first we install sudo:

Then we set parameters with visudo:

This run your default text editor, we edit for a named user:

Or for the wheel group users:

Polkit Rules and Actions
For an ordinary user to perform root only actions, we need to put a javascript file in /etc/polkit-1/rules.d, for example named 55-allowing-actions.rules.

We get the list of actions with pkaction, their names are quite self-explaining:

We authorize an user belonging to wheel group to suspend, hibernate, shutdown and restart like this:

You can add to this file all actions you need, to change color profiles, use nano (Cinnamon files manager) as root, mount and eject medias, set screen backlight, use network manager etc. Just don't make javascript mistakes…! Several  blocks can be used.

Starting Cinnamon
If you don't use a login/display manager, make a .xinitrc file in your home directory with this content:

Then to start Xorg & Cinnamon, once logged:

With a display manager you can follow their wiki pages indications.

Mint-X Icons
By default, Cinnamon comes with gnome icons. Mint-X icons are on GitHub. You can unzip and put the icon set you want in /usr/share/icons, then make a cache for it (sample for Mint-X icons, there are also colored sets):

Desktop Icons Text Color
Text color in Cinnamon desktop is grey by default, not very readable, you can get white text by adding css rules in /usr/share/themes/Adwaita/gtk-3.0/gtk.css (Adwaita is the default theme coming with Cinnamon install):

Debugging
If problems you can launch Xorg server via ssh to get error messages, with  parameter for cinnamon-session:

Alternatively you can have a look at.

If Cinnamon can't launch, deleting  in your home directory is not enought, other Cinnamon items into other directories must be deleted too before X restart: ,  ,   &.

Installing Common Applications
Some usual Gnome, or not Gnome applications install.

Terminal
Lxterminal requires no dependencies, gnome-terminal needs systemd, mate-terminal should install all Mate desktop environment.

Others
For example calculator, screen copy utility, pictures & PDF display, system monitor, archive manager…