I traced the cause of the issue back to regenerating the UEFI grub config file and restarting. To fix run this (Assuming you use DNF package manager): dnf remove xorg-x11-drv-nvidia xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs akmod-nvidia kmod-nvidia* & dnf install akmod-nvidia kmod-nvidia (I had tried reinstalling the kernel module part of it many times) Strange enough reinstalling the complete driver fixed this. Xorg.Log didn't seem to provide any useful insights (it didn't throw any errors, just tried to load Nvidia driver and then all of a sudden switches to loading nouvau instead it doesn't seem to successfully load any of the nvidia driver) I guess what's happening is cinnamon trying to load Nvidia drivers, crashes, and goes to fallback mode on nouveau drivers where it doesn't crash. To confirm that my system is working on nouveau, uninstalling nouveau fixes cinnamon's crashing error. The drivers seem like they're working outside of X though, and the kernel paging bug doesn't occur until X is started. What happens when I boot with these X options, is a 'unable to handle kernel paging request' bug, (kernel seems to crash but doesn't say kernel panic I'd share the message but don't know how) and I'm all out of ideas. So I tried forcing X to use the nvidia driver. Not sure why nouveau driver would cause cinnamon to go into fallback mode (or if that's happening for an altogether different reason) I just installed the nvidia drivers on fedora 23 (kernels 4.2.3 and 4.3.5), and it worked fine for 1 or 2 restarts, but during my last few reboots, cinnamon has crashed and started in fallback mode (fedora 23 with cinnamon) and upon further investigation I saw that it was loading the nouveau driver.

Fedora nvidia drivers