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Mate Desktop 1.24
- imharvey 7y agoThis gave me flashbacks to Gnome 2 and how much I loved it.
- unixhero 7y agoThat is the idea!
- giancarlostoro 7y agoWeirdly enough I loved Gnome 2 but for whatever odd reason I prefer some of the other DE's out there. I use Budgie (on Ubuntu) at work though it has quirks, otherwise Gnome 3 is ok or I just go for KDE. It definitely felt like Gnome went from all these amazing customizations to being so limited though.
- p1necone 7y agoAfter Gnome 3 and the abomination of wasted screen real estate that was Unity released I switched to using XFCE on Linux environments and haven't really found anything better since. It's so snappy even on crappy hardware and is customizable enough.
- thepangolino 7y agoI actually liked unity. Putting the task bar on the side was a great idea at an age when screen started getting flatter and flatter. The HUD(?) was a great concept allowing easy Dutch within an apps menus.
- p1necone 7y agoMy problem was with the size of all the UI elements, it seemed to me that a lot of it was designed with a "touch first, M+K second" focus.
- Niccizero 7y agoThat's probably Gnome, Ubuntu was pretty manegeable as a KB+M desktop. I'd say it's as KB+M oriented as OS X. Gnome is more like the Ipad OS.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y ago> Putting the task bar on the side was a great idea at an age when screen started getting flatter and flatter. That's hardly innovation though since most DEs over the past 2+ decades that I can think of would let you move the taskbar (if they had one) anyway.
- Sharlin 7y agoIndeed even Windows 95 let you do that.
- IshKebab 7y agoI agree - taskbar on the side is the best layout. It's very common on Macs and you can do it in Windows 10 now too. The problem with Unity was that it was buggy as hell, and the launcher was really badly styled. Huge gaps between icons, the search filter was unusable, etc.
- zapzupnz 7y agoI was always a KDE 3 kinda guy. I tried TDE, which is to KDE 3 as Mate is to GNOME 2, and … boy, you really appreciate how the Mate project managed to keep everything good about GNOME 2 but modernise at the same time.
- platypii 7y agoReally grateful that Mate exists. To this day, gnome3 has not reached parity with gnome2 on flexibility of configuration. I don't even make a lot of customizations to my desktop, but having the option when I need it is really key.
- jahlove 7y agoAgreed with everything said here. The crazy thing is, Gnome3 was released over 10 years ago!
- ianai 7y agoYep. It’s like they decided to copy the worst of windows 8.
- Lammy 7y agoIt predates Windows 8. More like copy the worst of the iPad imo.
- PlutoIsAPlanet 7y agoI think it actually copies a lot more of WebOS than the iPad
- pizza234 7y agoGNOME doesn't reach parity on configurability because... it's by design. There is an extensive post on the subject: https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotting-in-threes https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotti.... It's tragicomic to read ("And I have no idea what XFCE is or does sorry.") I'd say that the GNOME devs have Jobs' ego and intention, but none of his talent(s). But at least they have branding™! /s
- Lammy 7y agoIt doesn't happen very often any more, but when people always used to ask why I didn't like GNOME 3 I'd just point them to the devs' own words on the mailing list: https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-shell-list/2011-June/msg00110.html https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-shell-list/2011-June/m...
- dleslie 7y agoMate is easily the best Linux DE available; I love that they're focusing on fixing bugs and incremental improvements to keep pace with hardware improvements, rather than chasing unneeded software features.
- mongol 7y agoHow does Mate compare to XFCE? Not as "which is better" but as "what are the main differences"?
- kop316 7y agoXFCE is designed from the get go to be very light weight. On my laptop I average ~300 MB Ram usage idling with XFCE. MATE is the spiritual successor to Gnome 2, which isn't as light weight (but they haven't tried to add things to make it bloated, and gnome 2 was never too resource intensive). It is taking ~700 MB idling on that same laptop.
- bombela 7y agoI use mate desktop with i3 for the windows management. This means everything just works. Volume keys, brightness, usb storage auto-mounting, complex audio configuration, printers configuration, lock screen, battery management, mouse settings, external displays settings, screenshots and so on and so forth. I get the best of both world. Without Mate, I would have to hack everything together and spend days configuring everything by hand. If you want to replicate this setup: Start with Ubuntu Mate. Install i3 via apt. Select i3 on the login screen. In your i3 configuration add the following: exec --no-startup-id exec mate-settings-daemon exec --no-startup-id exec mate-screensaver exec --no-startup-id exec mate-power-manager exec --no-startup-id exec nm-applet Welcome to the year of Desktop on Linux.
- Tenoke 7y agoI've tried tiling WMs a few times, maybe 4 years ago last and liked them (inclduing i3) but at least at the time there were too many problems. If everything works now, Id be willing to try i3 when I install ubuntu 20.04. Is it now easy to set up a launcher/start bar with a nice battery/volume/wifi etc. indicator? That work both when I click on them and via keys and with the icons visibly changing based on the current state? Do all Windows open normally? Do they all fullscreen normally? Which don't? Do you get any crashes? Are there any WM-specific settings/fixes you have to tweak more often than once every 6 months?
- DyslexicAtheist 7y agobeen using i3 since 2 years now after dwm, blackbox and others. i3 commands have quickly become muscle memory and I don't look back. > Is it now easy to set up a launcher/start bar with a nice battery/volume/wifi etc. indicator? I've been using bumblebee-status for that and it works like a charm. It's very modular too: https://github.com/tobi-wan-kenobi/bumblebee-status https://github.com/tobi-wan-kenobi/bumblebee-status here are a couple of dotfiles: .config/i3/config: https://pastebin.com/n9rAWNhf https://pastebin.com/n9rAWNhf .config/i3/scripts/i3exit https://pastebin.com/CxETEW9H https://pastebin.com/CxETEW9H I highly recommend to use i3-save-tree to dump the json into a file (e.g. workspace_[number].json) to get your terminals (or any other applications) set up when logging in exactly the way you want. sometimes the json needs editing (here is what it would look like in my setup): .config/i3/workspace-1.json https://pastebin.com/7VGbQShy https://pastebin.com/7VGbQShy
- princevegeta89 7y agoUsed MATE a couple of times. I'd say it is the most beautiful and a generally well done lightweight DE. Takes me back to early Ubuntu days
- dyingkneepad 7y agoGnome 2 was a very shiny and polished desktop environment. Its death (in favor of Gnome 3) meant a lot of people who contributed to it (e.g., me) got fragmented into Mate, Cinnamon, Xfce and others. I wonder what would have happened if Gnome was still a usable thing and this massive migration out of it was not necessary. Would we have fought over some other problem and forked regardless? Would we all have worked together to make it even more awersome? It also saddens me that Red Hat insists on dumping its money in Gnome 3. I would love if they were putting their resources in improving something I actually use :).
- dleslie 7y agoIt didn't die; somehow it changed direction hard enough to lose significant developer capacity. I liken it to the total failure of the Flickr rewrite. Flickr could have been Facebook! So... How did that happen? Who was responsible for setting Gnome dev back by half a decade?
- BearOso 7y agoI still hold that they should’ve renamed GNOME 3 something other than GNOME and let each develop as their own things. I feel like that method would’ve hemorrhaged fewer developers. Clearly there was some sort of closed meeting at Redhat with the few people that inherited leadership of GNOME deciding on the complete overhaul; it wasn’t a democratic process. GNOME 3 is performing well enough now that I have moved over to it. At its introduction, though, it forced compositing, and drivers were not ready. That coupled with the massive UI changes gave users good reasons to complain.
- dleslie 7y agoIt cannot run on most ARM SBCs; I can't run it with any reasonable consistent responsiveness on any but my newest PC. Gnome 3 is _still_ a pig; and utterly useless to most of the world which still operates on half decade or decade old PCs. It's a prime example of privileged western developers overlooking the needs of their users.
- nbrempel 7y agoIs Wayland support a big deal? Or do most desktop environment support both Wayland and X11 in some way? I'm not familiar with how it works.
- axaxs 7y agoWayland is "the future", but I don't bother with it. It has too many warts and lack of support. Screen sharing support is a hack that kinda works, except for Electron apps. X 'just works'.
- jl6 7y agoI switched to XFCE away from Gnome 3 after becoming frustrated with Nautilus’s lack of type-ahead-find. I am perfectly happy with XFCE now. I’d be interested to hear from users with experience of both XFCE and MATE how they compare, as they seem to have similar design goals.
- nolok 7y agoAs a fellow xfce user, it's hard to get convinced by other alternatives because why they may have more polished on some things, the things they do worse will be really worse. You only need to fight one or two time with your wifi or Taskbar after an update to realize you just don't want to waste your time doing that. With that said, for the part that work well Mate definitely feels like a cleaner nicer xfce.
- HerrMonnezza 7y agoI really really wish Ubuntu had decided to ship MATE as their default desktop at the time of the GNOME 2 to 3 transition, instead of trying to create their own DE, abandon it 4 years later, and then reverting on GNOME3 ...
- garaetjjte 7y agoThere was some speculation that GNOME3 redesign was done because of Microsoft patent threats https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/03/thank_microsoft_for_linux_desktop_fail/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/03/thank_microsoft_for...
- Nux 7y agoSuper grateful for this project, I use it every day on all my computers. Maybe it's the age talking, but to me it feels like Gnome2/MATE is the peak of the desktop paradigm. Also Windows XP/7, in terms of UI/X. People took the desktop for what it was and tried to make the most of it. Nowadays most DEs, including Windows feel like they are made for a phone or a tablet.
- aelo 7y agoI'm honestly really happy with GnomeShell once I install the extensions "dash to dock" and "workspace matrix".
- dyingkneepad 7y agoUntil you apt-get update and they break :)
- sdfin 7y agoI like XFCE and MATE but I decided to use Gnome 3 only because with XFCE and MATE I had some problems connecting a TV with HDMI to the computer. With some tweaking it works, but with Gnome 3 it works out of the box, as it does in Windows.
- uxp100 7y agoYeah, I was just thinking of switching away from Mate on my laptop yesterday because of the external monitor experience. It was struggle to get it working, and once it does it is nowhere near seamless.
- superkuh 7y agoThey're dropping python2 support for caja (nautilus) plugins so watch out if you have any python based caja (nautilus) scripts. Not that that's unreasonable. Just beware.
- oxplot 7y agoI'm still rocking MATE+Compiz on Arch and it's a pleasure to work with (as much as it was back in 2008). Really appreciate the work of all the devs who keep maintaining both of these to date.
- kop316 7y agoIt's funny to think about, I first used Gnome 2 in 2006 and I remember having to install XFCE on my laptop. My laptop only had 256 MB of RAM, so GNOME at the time was too resource intensive. My Desktop had 2 GB of ram (so it couldn't really run Vista when that came out), but it could run Gnome + Compiz extremely well. I don't have that laptop anymore, but I now have a Thinkpad X200, which has 8 GB of RAM. So now Gnome 2 is "lightweight" since it can consume under 1 GB idling, and it is sitting at 1.7 GB with normal usage. I'm glad to see that some software hasn't been bloated up simply because the processing power exists.
- anthk 7y agoDitto. I uses Gnome2 under an Athlon an 256MB of RAM too, but Fedora's Gnome 2 was unusable, Debian was far faster. Nowadays is either Fluxbox+rox+udiskie on Slackware/+hotplug-diskmount under OpenBSD.
- genpfault 7y agobuster-backports when? :)
- johnmarcus 7y agoI have been using gnome 3 on zorin and popos for a few months without issue. What am I missing that everyone here seems to think it's disfunctional?
- anthk 7y agoGorilla and Motif themes :D. Now we need these old icons adapted to the new XDG standards and I'm done.