Ubuntu MATE 16.10 Moving To GTK3

[JonathanM]

A more accurate relationship would be someone saying "I'm gonna port KDE 4 to Qt5!" And calling it a new project. LxQt and KDE are in fact different and have different aims. GTK3!Mate and Cinnamon are going to be direct mirrors of eachother. This is basically forking for forking's sake.

I would be very interested in a frank answer from the Mate devs why they see porting as the answer, rather than just declaring Cinnamon the successor to Mate.

The applications may be very similar, but the DE components are as far as I know quite different. Mate can probably be configured to look and feel a lot like a Cinnamon desktop, but even then the underlying architecture is different. Mate, is as far as I know, more modular. You can, for example swap the window manager out for something different, something you can't do with Cinnamon.
Disclaimer: I haven't used mate myself. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

[starshipeleven]

I would be very interested in a frank answer from the Mate devs why they see porting as the answer, rather than just declaring Cinnamon the successor to Mate.

Not a MATE dev, but I use MATE since... it existed basically, and also tried Cinnamon and I also use Gnome (on a touchscreen laptop).

MATE is basically Gnome 2 brought back from the dead, it is rational, modular and so on. It follows old-school design principles. It's been pretty damn stable whatever you throw at it, and as long as they just do a porting without adding random shit, it will remain so.

Cinnamon is a full Gnome 3 suite hack with a slew of additional things, and imho a poor attempt at it (Budgie from Solus got it MUCH more right as it just turns Gnome3 into desktop-mode and that's it).
Ah yes it is a work in progress since the beginning, bugs and weird things happen.

I don't know if it is due to GTK2 but MATE is a 2D-only DE so far, while Cinnamon (being a hack of Gnome 3) needs OpenGL 2.0 (and is also pretty picky).

So yes, I support the porting, as they are two projects with very different goals, with a different product quality.

[liam]

Not a MATE dev, but I use MATE since... it existed basically, and also tried Cinnamon and I also use Gnome (on a touchscreen laptop).

MATE is basically Gnome 2 brought back from the dead, it is rational, modular and so on. It follows old-school design principles. It's been pretty damn stable whatever you throw at it, and as long as they just do a porting without adding random shit, it will remain so.

Cinnamon is a full Gnome 3 suite hack with a slew of additional things, and imho a poor attempt at it (Budgie from Solus got it MUCH more right as it just turns Gnome3 into desktop-mode and that's it).
Ah yes it is a work in progress since the beginning, bugs and weird things happen.

I don't know if it is due to GTK2 but MATE is a 2D-only DE so far, while Cinnamon (being a hack of Gnome 3) needs OpenGL 2.0 (and is also pretty picky).

So yes, I support the porting, as they are two projects with very different goals, with a different product quality.

So, without Budgie, what mode is Gnome 3 in?
Don't tell me touchscreen, either, b/c it is,currently, terrible at that (but it's getting better).

[Luke]

So... it will be cinnamon?

Not at all. Cinnamon is a fork of Clutter-based GNOME 3 and still uses all those javascript UI files. Cinnamon and MATE do a similar job but MATE uses far more efficient compiled code (mostly C) that was written from the beginning to do this job instead of another. This is true no matter what the toolkit.

Cinnamon is gorgeous but has a reputation for being slow due to all that interpreted code. The GNOME 3 stack was designed for a totally different UI with more emphasis on the "overlay" and features not relevant to Cinnamon's job. To speed up Cinnamon will probably require a refork now that GNOME no longer uses all those scripts.

[Awesomeness]

Mate was a fork of GNOME 2 + GTK2 and is moving towards a fork of GNOME 2 + GTK3.

Gnome 3 Fallback/Flashback already ported the Gnome 2 desktop to GTK3: https://wiki.gnome.org/Projects/GnomeFlashback

[Akka]

A more accurate relationship would be someone saying "I'm gonna port KDE 4 to Qt5!" And calling it a new project. LxQt and KDE are in fact different and have different aims. GTK3!Mate and Cinnamon are going to be direct mirrors of eachother. This is basically forking for forking's sake.

I would be very interested in a frank answer from the Mate devs why they see porting as the answer, rather than just declaring Cinnamon the successor to Mate.

The big difference is mate forked gnome panel. Cinnamon forked gnome shell. Gnome killed the gnome panel code. The new shell is a plugin to mutter.

[ossuser]

Let's not forget about normal not-technical users, and what they want. As in a user interface they can relate to. With tools (filemanager, etc) that are straightforward and simple to use. Normal users will decide the success of Linux based desktops, not us. Apart from those millions of users, there's the business user. For them consistancy, stability and managability is extra important. My opinion (in respect to normal users): * KDE as a DE -while very feature complete- has too much visible bells and whistles * GNOME Shell is too flashy * Unity is tied to Canonical, not good * The less heavy DE's are too technical As MATE builds on a classic interface, it has a good combination of consistency and usability. I've used it for years now, and I wish the MATE DE will become the Linux default desktop. So, ask yourself, the old woman next door asks you to install a Linux desktop for her. What would you give her, and why ? My 2 cents.

[Akka]

Let's not forget about normal not-technical users, and what they want. As in a user interface they can relate to. With tools (filemanager, etc) that are straightforward and simple to use. Normal users will decide the success of Linux based desktops, not us. Apart from those millions of users, there's the business user. For them consistancy, stability and managability is extra important. My opinion (in respect to normal users): * KDE as a DE -while very feature complete- has too much visible bells and whistles * GNOME Shell is too flashy * Unity is tied to Canonical, not good * The less heavy DE's are too technical As MATE builds on a classic interface, it has a good combination of consistency and usability. I've used it for years now, and I wish the MATE DE will become the Linux default desktop. So, ask yourself, the old woman next door asks you to install a Linux desktop for her. What would you give her, and why ? My 2 cents.

No logic in that. This sort of old paradigm don't exist anymore outside of the foss desktops. People coming from windows and osx is not accustomed to something similar to Mate.

[ossuser]

@Akka: I obviously don't agree. In my experience people quite quickly adapt to Mate (or Cinnamon). And not to Gnome shell or KDE. Usability and consistancy matters. And exactly OSX and Windows have proven that.

[bug77]

@Akka: I obviously don't agree. In my experience people quite quickly adapt to Mate (or Cinnamon). And not to Gnome shell or KDE. Usability and consistancy matters. And exactly OSX and Windows have proven that.

If consistency matters, what's consistent when you move from any other DE (Windows and OS X included) to Mate?