GNOME 2 Fork MATE Desktop Aims For Wayland

[squirrl]

Yes, metacity has compositing, but few people used it. However, if it's anything like xfce and uses Xrender, then you'll still get tearing. Have you tried running the compton compositor on top of MATE?

XFCE can use compiz.

Also if you turn on :"Tear Free; AMD" and "Vert Refresh; Nvidia" you shouldn't see any ripples through your video.

[Nobu]

Fast in computers is relative. Machines get faster while code gets fatter, so desktops stay the same or slow down. Capability for games or video
editing goes up, but general responsiveness does not. Fastest machine I ever saw in terms of opening programs was a Pentium III into which I had
dropped an ancient 125MB hard drive with Windows 3.1 on it just to see what it would do. DSL was pretty responsive on an even older Pentium II laptop but did not have open drivers for my wireless sticks at that time (2009).

Xfce is right snappy on my (sure, by no means slow) A6 laptop with 16GB RAM and a SSD--from POST to DM in < 4s, and less than .5s from there to my desktop. ArchLinux, ftw!

[Luke]

IceWM is lighter yet

Xfce and LXDE are better suited for older computers than MATE currently is, and Cinnamon fills the high end market, so I still don't really see the point of MATE.

When I need maximum performance on a netbook or an older computer I use IceWM, but MATE is close enough for a lot of work and a lot easier
for "end users" to work with. A lot of people miss GNOME 2, Mint was smart to fork it.

Fast in computers is relative. Machines get faster while code gets fatter, so desktops stay the same or slow down. Capability for games or video
editing goes up, but general responsiveness does not. Fastest machine I ever saw in terms of opening programs was a Pentium III into which I had
dropped an ancient 125MB hard drive with Windows 3.1 on it just to see what it would do. DSL was pretty responsive on an even older Pentium II laptop but did not have open drivers for my wireless sticks at that time (2009).

[intellivision]

Yes. MATE is very desirable for older machines. A Pentium 4 2 GHZ with and AMD Radeon 1650 (R500) can run Cinnamon, but it isn't very responsive and cannot play 720P video. Running MATE the same machine will play 720P, hitting 100% CPU about 1/3 of the time, at about 90% CPU the rest of the time, and close enough to keeping up that setting framedrop in Mplayer won't cause the video to slideshow.

It might even be possible to run MATE on a Pentium 3 with no acceleration support so long as a version using X directly is used, or the option to do so retained. Something like DSL will run a LOT faster, but since Ubuntu Maverick can make a decent web surfer on a dumpstered PIII, there is a good chance that Mint with MATE can do the same, I plan to find out tomorrow.

I would say we are at least 5 years away from everyone having every computer they need to use suppot OpenGL2.0, even if the computer is from the dumpster.

Xfce and LXDE are better suited for older computers than MATE currently is, and Cinnamon fills the high end market, so I still don't really see the point of MATE.

[Luke]

Mate is great for older machines

Since we can assume that Xfce and Cinnamon will be using GTK 3 and Wayland in the future, is there any niche that MATE serves or will serve that the two former options don't already?

Yes. MATE is very desirable for older machines. A Pentium 4 2 GHZ with and AMD Radeon 1650 (R500) can run Cinnamon, but it isn't very responsive and cannot play 720P video. Running MATE the same machine will play 720P, hitting 100% CPU about 1/3 of the time, at about 90% CPU the rest of the time, and close enough to keeping up that setting framedrop in Mplayer won't cause the video to slideshow.

It might even be possible to run MATE on a Pentium 3 with no acceleration support so long as a version using X directly is used, or the option to do so retained. Something like DSL will run a LOT faster, but since Ubuntu Maverick can make a decent web surfer on a dumpstered PIII, there is a good chance that Mint with MATE can do the same, I plan to find out tomorrow.

I would say we are at least 5 years away from everyone having every computer they need to use suppot OpenGL2.0, even if the computer is from the dumpster.

[intellivision]

Since we can assume that Xfce and Cinnamon will be using GTK 3 and Wayland in the future, is there any niche that MATE serves or will serve that the two former options don't already?

[mrugiero]

The idea of lxde going qt sounds great, there seems to be too many gtk desktops and too few qt ones.

If it sounds great to you because of a bigger amount of Qt desktops, I must break the bad news to you: it merges with Razor, so it's still the same number (whatever it is) of desktops based on Qt.

mir packages can also be flagged as conflict with wayland; then everyone will go their merry way: Ubuntu with their unity and mir, everyone else with their de and wayland

It's probably not that easy, since Ubuntu needs custom mesa patches to work with Mir, and this might (or might not, of course, but it's somewhat unpredictable) break compatibility with Wayland. In fact, that's the troublesome piece. There's probably no problem (as long as a correct configuration exists) in having both Wayland and Mir installed, provided mesa supports both.

[bwat47]

FWIW they can just use mutter with the default plugin which is pretty much like old metacity + clutter based cm.

Standalone mutter is awful, i've tried it. Its very buggy and broken when just use with "mutter --replace". For example the alt tab switcher is just awful, as are the animations. Its really meant to base other window managers on usng libmutter (like gnome-shell and gala do).

[Artemis3]

It is a good desktop, nothing like gnome3, or the buggier gnome2.

I also use Xfce and e17, and occasionally lxde. The idea of lxde going qt sounds great, there seems to be too many gtk desktops and too few qt ones.

Someone said Xubuntu will disappear, this is highly unlikely. Ubuntu is going to inherit the wayland packages from Debian, and there should be no reason for them to take them out from the repositories; mir packages can also be flagged as conflict with wayland; then everyone will go their merry way: Ubuntu with their unity and mir, everyone else with their de and wayland

And speaking of Debian, i wish mate had made it to wheezy, but alas, that could not be. At least its on jessie.
Now Debian should have defaulted to that instead of pushing gnome3 thru the noses to everyone. The damage has already been done.

[drago01]

I should have been more specific. Metacity lacks "proper" tear-free opengl compositing. It has compositing, but it uses xrender last I checked and had video tearing.

FWIW they can just use mutter with the default plugin which is pretty much like old metacity + clutter based cm.