MATE 1.24 Released For Letting GNOME 2 Continuation Live On In 2020

[rastersoft]

When Fedora switched to Gnome 3 (with Fedora 15 IIRC), I tried using "fallback" (or "classic" or whatever the hell it was called at the time), and it was absolute junk. It was claimed to preserve the "look and feel" of Gnome 2, but it did so in only the most superficial and non-functional manner possible. It didn't allow icons or launchers that Gnome 2 had. I think there were some other omissions, but those were the dealbreakers for me. When I asked about it, I was told that those were not part of "look and feel". What utter BS. I tried Cinnamon, which was pretty good, but I like MATE better. I haven't looked back since.

I suspect that the true reason is that the icons and launchers for the panel are programmed with Gtk, so Gnome Fallback needed them rewritten with Gtk3 (which makes sense), so if the original creator did not that job, then it makes sense that they didn't work. You can't mix Gtk2 and Gtk3.

[torsionbar28]

There are also two prominent KDE spinoffs: TDE and LiquidShell. But you wouldn't dare to say that that's because a lot of people are disappointed with Plasma, would you?

I would dare. These two have slightly different aims, but clearly they are targeting users who are dissatisfied with Plasma. I used KDE in 1999 timeframe when it was version 1, but haven't touched it much since then, so I don't really have a horse in that race.

One cannot deny that there is community demand for lighter weight desktop alternatives to both Gnome 3 and KDE 5, due to dissatisfaction with either the hardware resource requirements, or the design decisions, or both.

[k1e0x]

I'm all in about learning something new and doing something differently. But the new way has to actually be better than the old one. In many ways reforms over classic desktop paradigms aren't really improvements IMO. For example expose. Instead of just clicking the taskbar and focusing window it needs first to do hot corner or keybinding or such, slight delay when doing animations, search which window you want to focus and then clicking. So there's extra steps and delays and it produces more visual and workflow disturbance and it needs more resources to do that.

Yes but it's been found to be easier to select the window you want by showing you zoomed out pictures of the window rather than an icon and words. This is why all major OS's do it now. Even Android and iOS (Windows 10 takes a hybrid approach and shows thumbnails in the taskbar) I think the reason for this is we have more computing resources now and people have mutable windows of the same app and lots of windows open.

Same thing with the application list, it becomes easier to search rather than to browse a list when you have hundreds of apps.

I was an early convert to Gnome 3 and I remember those first few weeks I didn't like it at first.. but I took some time and learned it and got use to it and now it's my preferred desktop. I find it really easy to use and try to setup macOS and Windows to be as close as possible to it.

[k1e0x]

There's a lot of derision on this forum for anything that isn't using the same RedHat commodity software as all the big commercially-supported distros. Anyone with a different thought about how to approach the desktop or the init system or audio or graphics is openly mocked. Major projects like Gentoo and Arch are completely ignored. Kind of sad to see. This used to be an enjoyable and eclectic community where someone could learn a lot, but now conformity appears to be all that matters.

I totally agree with this. I think Redhat should fork. A large number of people have no interest in doing things there way. In some light this is giving rise to FreeBSD because there is no illusion they need to conform.

[k1e0x]

That's a matter of opinion. What you consider faster others may consider to by an annoyance. Case in point -- the Activities hotcorner. Plasma has one too. First thing I do is disable them because they annoy me when watching crap on Netflix Prime -- move my mouse down and I get media controls, been like that for a long time, top right may have window controls, which leaves top left as a place to sling the mouse pointer towards and fucking Activities activates and it makes me wish I had assloads of money to go full on Jay and Silent Bob on Gnome Developers.

I'm content with using ALT+TAB to bring up all my windows when...well...I don't really need to because I use a desktop with a taskbar so I just click on the program bar on the taskbar because that's faster than hotcorners or ALT+TAB...

Oh idk I like it, it's a quick way to break out of the video, like an alt+tab. I don't really use my mouse for media controls on a full screen video.. I use the keyboard but I've been using that expose style for over 10 years so.. maybe I'm trained lol I only use top right and top left hot corners but I use them on everything.. even windows. (actually I only use top right on mac for notifications) For other windows I don't full screen anything at all.. I think thats a throwback I have from Windows 3.1 era where I would cascade my windows so all of them had an area to click and raise them. (I do think thats an oddity in how I lay stuff out)

[240Hz]

What is the point of Xfce when Mate exists?
Xfce is good, but releses every 10 years. Mate is also more complete.
If you can make them work together, we would probably get better DE.

XFCE is older than Mate, the next XFCE release is soon and if MATE devs helped XFCE then XFCE would be developed faster.

[angrypie]

Desktop icons is official extension so it shouldn't break because it's maintained by GNOME developers.

lulz

https://gitlab.gnome.org/World/ShellExtensions/desktop-icons/issues/137#note_677618

[torsionbar28]

I totally agree with this. I think Redhat should fork. A large number of people have no interest in doing things there way. In some light this is giving rise to FreeBSD because there is no illusion they need to conform.

Fork, and do what, exactly? Fedora already offers spins for all the major desktop environments. Meanwhile we have forks of Red Hat like Scientific Linux coming to an end, because they don't offer enough differentiation from upstream to justify an entire distro - a 3rd party repo is all that's required in most cases to achieve whatever customization you like. I'm genuinely curious what you would do so differently that it would justify a full fork.

[k1e0x]

Fork, and do what, exactly? Fedora already offers spins for all the major desktop environments. Meanwhile we have forks of Red Hat like Scientific Linux coming to an end, because they don't offer enough differentiation from upstream to justify an entire distro - a 3rd party repo is all that's required in most cases to achieve whatever customization you like. I'm genuinely curious what you would do so differently that it would justify a full fork.

A) The difference between a Linux system isn't the desktop it runs. wft lol That is just software you run, you can put KDE on Windows.
B) I'd like to see something more like Alpine, Gentoo or maybe Slackware. Different libc, different system layout, more standard unix configuration, openrc etc etc. Traditional Unix with a Linux kernel.

[LightBit]

XFCE is older than Mate, the next XFCE release is soon and if MATE devs helped XFCE then XFCE would be developed faster.

Tell that to devs.
I just use what works best for me. I used Xfce in the past, but now Mate is better.