MATE 1.12 Brings GTK3 & Systemd Improvements, But No Wayland Yet

[Luke]

I wonder what's the rush with so many releases (10, 11, 12) with so little improvements?
They should've done point releases

In addition to the Linux Mint timings, GTK3 support is greatly improved in MATE 1.12. When 1.10 came out GTK3 would work but was a buggy mess. Now MATE with gtk3 is good enough I would not hesitate to give it to a non-hacker. In addition, GTK3 builds now support custom theming for panel elements such as menus and sliders. Calendar week numbers can be turned on and off, those GTK3 overlay scrollbars can be turned on or off, a lot of "papercut" issues have been dealt with.

[suberimakuri]

You guys prefer Mate over XFCE?
I've run XFCE for years and never really tried anything else apart from LXDE (too light!).
i5 laptop, so not too shabby. openbox on HTPC.

[Jumbotron]

You guys prefer Mate over XFCE?
I've run XFCE for years and never really tried anything else apart from LXDE (too light!).
i5 laptop, so not too shabby. openbox on HTPC.

Although I have used XFCE a while ago....it's not so much that I prefer MATE over XFCE. In fact, this is my first time with MATE. Of course, as it is a fork of GNOME 2 it's kind of like going back home to my first experience with Fedora ( well...it was Red Hat all those years ago ).

It's still to soon for me to objectively say I like MATE over Cinnamon or even XFCE. But, I've been distro hopping and DE hopping for years now, and I'm growing a bit tired of it. Plus my family, who I am slowly getting them converted over to Linux, is getting tired of me changing their distros on their computers...( my wife won't let me touch her Windows machine until I make up my mind ).

I like what I see and feel so far with Ubuntu MATE although one BIG negative is that a program I use called Red Shift does not completely work on this distro as it does with Linux Mint 17.2 with Cinnamon. It is a program that changes the gamma settings of your display so that when the sun sets, it tints your screen red so as not to bathe your eyes in white light at night which can play hell with your sleep patterns. I have Red Shift set to auto start on bootup, however, there is an error with Geoclue 2 whereas Red Shift never comes on at sunset to tint the screen red. It's there, but it doesn't work. If I disable it and relaunch then it works. This may be an Ubuntu 15.10 issue.....a MATE issue....or the fact that I'm running this on a ThinkPad W530 with Nvidia Optimus, whereas, on my workstation ( a homebrew Core2Duo with an Nvidia GTX 285 ) with Linux Mint 17.2 on Cinnamon, Red Shift works perfectly.

Probably, when Linux Mint 17.3 comes out, I will install not only that with Cinnamon but also their MATE spin on this W530 to see if I can replicate that bug. Then, I'll decide whether to standardize on Mint with Cinnamon or Ubuntu with MATE. I like the stability of Linux Mint. I just don't like the fact that they get so far behind on certain apps because they adhere to the Ubuntu LTS schedule. Things get a bit "long in the tooth" as opposed to Ubuntu's 6 month schedule. But of course....this can lead to certain regressions that the guys at Linux Mint warn about. Pick your poison, I guess.