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Happy Birthday, MATE . (<https://mate-desktop.org https://mate-desktop.org>) What is called "GNOME" today is something else.

n3storm 4y ago
Thanks GNOME for facilitating me meeting XFCE
- PontifexMinimus 4y ago
  I moved to XFCE ages ago when Gnome and KDE kept changing things. XFCE mostly stays the same, which is as it should be. Stop reinventing the wheel!
- pjmlp 4y ago
  Same here, even with my C rants, that is exactly my desktop environment on the surviving netbook that still runs Linux. Kudos to XFCE devs.
konart 4y ago
>What is called "GNOME" today is something else. This is like telling somebody who's been into math for the past ten years and then decided to dive deep into arts they are now a different person. You may not like the change, but Gnome is still Gnome.
- traverseda 4y ago
  I guess that depends on if you see Gnome as an organization or as a desktop environment. The organization is 25 years old, but I'd argue that the desktop environment is not. Gnome 3 was a big enough change that I think it's reasonable to consider it an entirely new desktop environment.
  - konart 4y ago
    I'm talking about (r)evolution of a software. I find it strange that people agree that windows 10 is still windows just like windows 3.11 but Gnome 42 is somehow 'not Gnome' anymore. Anyway, I don't there is any point to argue about it. Depending on interpretation we can say that every human wakes up as an entirely new entity every day too.
jp2022 4y ago
>Happy Birthday, MATE Too bad that GTK is more or less controlled by the GNOME people which means that useful features are getting deprecated left and right. For this reason I sadly had to leave MATE and everything else GTK related behind since you never know how much will be deprecated in the next big GTK release. I just wish we would have a stable DE and Toolkit that only receives bug-fixes and nothing else. GNOME2 (and also GNOME 1.4) was good as is for me. I never needed more and don't want my user interface to change at all. It would be perfect if one could just compile GNOME 1.4 or GNOME 2.x without having to worry about some changes in a dependency of the DE making it unusable.
- badsectoracula 4y ago
  > I just wish we would have a stable DE and Toolkit that only receives bug-fixes and nothing else. That is not a good idea because new computers and hardware have new features that you'd want to use from your existing programs. For example you'd certainly want touch support for the laptops that have it, scaling support for high DPI screens, hardware acceleration support for having fast and smooth graphics on slower machines that still have hardware accelerated graphics (e.g. Raspberry Pi), etc. The thing isn't to only get bug fixes and nothing else, but to get bug fixes and new features - but done in a completely backwards compatible way (even if that means new features have to be done by explicitly opting in to them). This is harder and not as interesting as rewriting things from scratch though.
  - Crysstalis 4y ago
    GTK was not rewritten from scratch. Each major release has been an incremental improvement.
    - badsectoracula 4y ago
      Gtk in its entirety was never written from scratch but Gtk is big and individual components and parts of it have been written from scratch and has broken backwards compatibility in major ways, requiring from applications and libraries that depend on it to waste time keeping up with those changes (see XFCE or even GIMP as examples that took literally years to update to a new major version, only for Gtk developers to break their APIs again). It reminds me of that old "Fire and Motion" article by Joel[0], especially these last bits: > Think of the history of data access strategies to come out of Microsoft. ODBC, RDO, DAO, ADO, OLEDB, now ADO.NET – All New! Are these technological imperatives? [..] The competition has no choice but to spend all their time porting and keeping up, time that they can’t spend writing new features. [..] People get worried about .NET and decide to rewrite their whole architecture for .NET because they think they have to. Microsoft is shooting at you, and it’s just cover fire so that they can move forward and you can’t, because this is how the game is played, Bubby. Except of course, unlike Microsoft, GNOME and Gtk have nothing to gain by shooting the developers that depend on their APIs :-P [0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/

n3storm 4y ago

Thanks GNOME for facilitating me meeting XFCE

PontifexMinimus 4y ago
I moved to XFCE ages ago when Gnome and KDE kept changing things. XFCE mostly stays the same, which is as it should be. Stop reinventing the wheel!
pjmlp 4y ago
Same here, even with my C rants, that is exactly my desktop environment on the surviving netbook that still runs Linux. Kudos to XFCE devs.

konart 4y ago

>What is called "GNOME" today is something else. This is like telling somebody who's been into math for the past ten years and then decided to dive deep into arts they are now a different person. You may not like the change, but Gnome is still Gnome.

traverseda 4y ago
I guess that depends on if you see Gnome as an organization or as a desktop environment. The organization is 25 years old, but I'd argue that the desktop environment is not. Gnome 3 was a big enough change that I think it's reasonable to consider it an entirely new desktop environment.
- konart 4y ago
  I'm talking about (r)evolution of a software. I find it strange that people agree that windows 10 is still windows just like windows 3.11 but Gnome 42 is somehow 'not Gnome' anymore. Anyway, I don't there is any point to argue about it. Depending on interpretation we can say that every human wakes up as an entirely new entity every day too.

jp2022 4y ago

>Happy Birthday, MATE Too bad that GTK is more or less controlled by the GNOME people which means that useful features are getting deprecated left and right. For this reason I sadly had to leave MATE and everything else GTK related behind since you never know how much will be deprecated in the next big GTK release. I just wish we would have a stable DE and Toolkit that only receives bug-fixes and nothing else. GNOME2 (and also GNOME 1.4) was good as is for me. I never needed more and don't want my user interface to change at all. It would be perfect if one could just compile GNOME 1.4 or GNOME 2.x without having to worry about some changes in a dependency of the DE making it unusable.

badsectoracula 4y ago
> I just wish we would have a stable DE and Toolkit that only receives bug-fixes and nothing else. That is not a good idea because new computers and hardware have new features that you'd want to use from your existing programs. For example you'd certainly want touch support for the laptops that have it, scaling support for high DPI screens, hardware acceleration support for having fast and smooth graphics on slower machines that still have hardware accelerated graphics (e.g. Raspberry Pi), etc. The thing isn't to only get bug fixes and nothing else, but to get bug fixes and new features - but done in a completely backwards compatible way (even if that means new features have to be done by explicitly opting in to them). This is harder and not as interesting as rewriting things from scratch though.
- Crysstalis 4y ago
  GTK was not rewritten from scratch. Each major release has been an incremental improvement.
  - badsectoracula 4y ago
    Gtk in its entirety was never written from scratch but Gtk is big and individual components and parts of it have been written from scratch and has broken backwards compatibility in major ways, requiring from applications and libraries that depend on it to waste time keeping up with those changes (see XFCE or even GIMP as examples that took literally years to update to a new major version, only for Gtk developers to break their APIs again). It reminds me of that old "Fire and Motion" article by Joel[0], especially these last bits: > Think of the history of data access strategies to come out of Microsoft. ODBC, RDO, DAO, ADO, OLEDB, now ADO.NET – All New! Are these technological imperatives? [..] The competition has no choice but to spend all their time porting and keeping up, time that they can’t spend writing new features. [..] People get worried about .NET and decide to rewrite their whole architecture for .NET because they think they have to. Microsoft is shooting at you, and it’s just cover fire so that they can move forward and you can’t, because this is how the game is played, Bubby. Except of course, unlike Microsoft, GNOME and Gtk have nothing to gain by shooting the developers that depend on their APIs :-P [0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2002/01/06/fire-and-motion/