MATE 1.26 Desktop Released With Some Wayland Support, Other Improvements

[waxhead]

Your whole post boils down to "I do not want to learn or even try something new, everything has to stay exactly as it was" and "it was all better in the past".

Basically having to repeat all the horrible UI sins committed by the past forever because some people have already gotten them into muscle memory and now a better solution.

I Think you miss the point of his post. Learning new things is great but learning a stupified way that takes more steps is not. Old GUI's was consistent. For example keyboard navigation and shortcuts. Resize bars. Scrollbars etc. Having things consistent is not a sin. Programs should generally not have to implement their own menus, shortcuts, themes etc. If anything these things should be as universal as possible. Just compare a old Vs new GUI. Functionally lost nighttime to looks... (And honestly is does not look great most of the time.) I could not use a GUI for rmlint because of be animations and insane menu layouts. I tried. Fslint is way more consistent. Just compare the two and see for yourself.

[topolinik]

If for instance you are a Teams user, you're reading a thread, ...

About the uglyness of Teams (but further applications are gonna follow this) I really would like to know who thought it was going to be a great idea placing the "search" box into the window upper bar, where every sane human user goes to click when they want to move the window. That's a very underestimate genius!

[Mez']

Your whole post boils down to "I do not want to learn or even try something new, everything has to stay exactly as it was" and "it was all better in the past".

The usual misconception of Gnome die hard self-entitled "modern paradigm" fans.
Personally, I enjoy learning new ways and I've adopted many new habits along the years. But... They must bring an added value to my workflow, otherwise they are dismissed in favor of the slightly older ways (not necessarily old).
Learning is one thing that you are confusing with adopting. Indeed, adopting new ways for the sake of it being new is properly idiotic. When learned, those new ways have to serve a workflow purpose to get adoption and replace fruitfully some old or older ways. We're not gulping whatever is thrown at us like yes men Gnome diehard fans have a tendency to do.
It's up to us to cherry pick which UI behaviors have actual value. It can also mean a big mix of old, less old, recent and shiny new paradigms, as long as that's what works for you in the most efficient way.
It's not just self-entitled modern Vs mocked old paradigms and people who do not want to learn while others do. It's such a basic view of things, it feels like talking to a child.

[kyrios]

The developers should focus on more critical problems then going backwards to keep alive a legacy environment. Linux has ~2.5% market share. Out of that hardly a significant number will be using MATE desktop. If they can use these resources in improving the user experience in general by contributing to gtk/kde plasma development or wayland itself that would be commendable.

Where does these ~2.5% figure come from ?

Following your reasoning, Linux desktop market share is ~2% so the developers should stop working on that, same for BSD... And Mozilla devs should abandon their products and help improving UX by contributing to Chromium/Blink. Which basically means supporting monopolies and abandonning diversity.

[Pajn]

Are they developing their own compositor or using an existing one?

They are using Mir. Though the components should work well with any compositor implementing standard wayland protocols so if kwin was easily runnable stand alone you could use it with that. Sway might work with some custom config. Mutter and Weston does not implement all the necessary protocols though.

[pgoetz]

Why is Mate still even a thing. 🤔

Because some people just want to get work done, don't care about eye candy, and want their desktop to consume a minimal amount of resources.

[pgoetz]

Your whole post boils down to "I do not want to learn or even try something new, everything has to stay exactly as it was" and "it was all better in the past".

Basically having to repeat all the horrible UI sins committed by the past forever because some people have already gotten them into muscle memory and now a better solution is not "discoverable" to them without "RTFM". The audacity.

Of what UI sins do you speak exactly? Also, regarding learning new things, I'm a Mate user and learn 10 new things every day. I have no interest in learning a new UI, given that my current one exactly meets my needs. I'd rather spend my time learning harmonic analysis, MPI, or Julia.

[abracat]

The undo button still doesn't work in mate-calc in financial mode. It's been this way since 1.16 or 1.18. I know your can just use gnome but still the point of a desktop is to use the packages of the desktop.

[andyprough]

Why is Mate still even a thing. 🤔

I don't use or particularly like Mate myself. But, I never cared for the original gnome either. But it did have plenty of fans, so I can see how that paradigm has still got a sufficient user base and developer base.

The fact that the modern Gnome seems both unnecessarily bloated in some ways and at the same time oddly restrictive of normal user interaction, and that it is developed by a group who appears to be overly busy with their partisan political campaigns is probably turning off some users and creating a void that desktops like Mate are filling.

[torsionbar28]

The developers should focus on more critical problems then going backwards to keep alive a legacy environment.

What legacy environment? MATE is fully GTK3 and now has Wayland support. It is latest and greatest to its core. No legacy stuff here. Seems you don't understand what MATE actually is?

Personally I won't use any other DE. Plenty of UI metaphors have been around for a very long time. Take the steering wheel and pedals in your car for example. As it was 100 years ago. Does the technology exist to drive a real car using a PS4 controller? Of course. Or using a touch screen? Sure. How about driving your car using WASD keyboard buttons? Yup. But manufacturers stick with the steering wheel and pedals. Why? Because it works well, and people are proficient with it. Done. No need to re-invent the wheel. MATE is similar. MATE uses traditional desktop metaphors that are familiar and efficient. But MATE does so with the latest technologies. Like a steering wheel in a modern car, that has buttons on it, is heated in winter, and leather wrapped for comfort. But it's still a wheel. KDE/GNOME3 demand you drive to work using three finger swipe to accelerate and two finger pinch for brakes; never mind that it's awkward and clunky, it's NEW!! so it must be better.