The theme for this release has been adding new functionality to the MATE Desktop while maintaining the look and feel that we all know and love. While all the added features are surely quite exciting we also did not forget to do tons of bugfixing, modernising the code base and optimizing the performance.
MATE is one of the two great alternatives for people who find GNOME 3 and later unpleasant (the other being Cinnamon, my DE of choice).
So I know at one point in time the main difference between Cinnamon and Mate was GTK+2 vs Gtk+3. But then the one that wasn’t on 3 upgraded. So I am no longer sure what the differences are.
I don’t mean this as a troll. I use Gnome and aware if the history (just can never remember which decided to hang back, and use older frameworks until it no longer seemed logical (everything has been ported by now).
GNOME 2 used GTK+ 2 and GNOME 3 used GTK+ 3. But GNOME 3 also changed a bunch of stuff, which some people didn’t like.
MATE is a fork of GNOME 2 and their main goal was to keep the old interface alive. I think they did it in a really smart way. In their first release they forked all the libraries, but gave them different names, in order not to clash with GNOME 3. Then they worked hard on porting the code to the new, upstream maintained libraries, culminating with the move from GTK+2 to GTK+3. It was a win-win: they got to keep their interface of choice without the burden of maintaining old libraries in the long run.
Cinnamon was just a fork of Gnome Shell, using the same underlying libraries of GNOME 3.
Which is funny because Gnome3+ has had official extensions to add the taskbar and application menu back since RHEL/C7 was released, and Gnome3+’s malleability has been used to create all sorts of new DE setups which wouldn’t have been possible with Gnome2.
Flatland_Spider,
I used to like gnome 2, but gnome 3 pushed me to KDE. I personally could not get gnome to look and work the way I wanted it to, although maybe it’s gotten better since it’s been a few years.
The funny thing about changes is that the end user doesn’t always appreciate them. On linux a lot of people don’t appreciate the changes, on windows a lot of people don’t appreciate changes, on macs a lot of people don’t appreciate changes, haha. Now I appreciate the logic in fixing things under the hood to clean out the cruft, but sometimes the common failure seems to be simply listening to what users want.
“People like change but don’t like to be changed.”
Why would anyone work on open source unless they believe they can do better than what previously existed? Why would anyone work at a software company unless they believe they can improve the product?
Unfortunately, this runs counter to what users want. IMO, what we’re seeing now is a confluence of two factors: first, as software has matured it’s becoming much less likely that changes are actually “better” because the existing standard is already high. Second, users appear to have much less influence on product design choices which are frequently driven by a combination of business factors (getting as much money from users as possible) or ego-driven resume building (I redesigned the tab bar for ten million people! Hire me!)
Things like this make me think we’ve passed the peak, because most software development serves no purpose, if purpose is defined as solving a user’s problem.
malxau,
I don’t quite agree with the first part of that quote because in my experience most of my clients hate when operating systems change.
Yeah, haha. What users want and what developers bring are not necessarily related 🙂
I think there are plenty of improvements to be had, but the industry is constantly being steered towards keeping incumbents in control rather than empowering owners. This agenda blocks competition and impedes innovation. Even the internet itself has been reduced from full end to end connectivity to centralized networks with most devices unable to communicate directly without going through a centralized providers thanks to NAT and firewalls. The IoT had so much potential but this too is being driven by companies that want consumer technologies to be locked under their control. This isn’t the future I want, but it’s the one that’s coming because that’s where the money’s at.
Alfman,
What the quote is getting at is people like creating change (for others) but not receiving change (from others.) Of your clients who don’t like operating systems changing, what do they do? Do they aim to do the same thing forever? Or are they trying to create a disruptive business, or push a new policy out across an organization, or develop a new community program, etc?
malxau,
I agree with that, haha.
Well, it varies. One local business owner is a technophobe, they don’t want to talk about operating systems, they don’t want to learn new operating systems, they just want things to run with minimal disruption to get back to what they want to do.
Another client is a contractor doing home installations and I’d summarize their perspective with unnecessary changes are costing them time and money for no real gain.
Another client calls me out of the blue just to cuss out changes in the new versions of windows and wonders why they won’t sell the versions of windows he wants, haha. He asks me what I use and is intrigued when I say it isn’t windows but linux, but I think it would be too much of a transition for him.
I feel like there’s more anti-change sentiment, but I’ve seen the opposite too. One business I work for is a windows shop through and through and I think they take all the changes in stride. They actually call me when they have to deal with linux though, because they’re encountering linux on some of their projects.
I don’t often provide windows support anymore though, mostly back end linux stuff. The main exception would be continuing support for older windows software. An upcoming project has a windows component but that’s atypical for me these days.
@Alfman
You’re underestimating your clients. For a start you have no idea what business and regulatory and financial pressures they may be under. You also seem to think your clients don’t have the intelligence to grasp the utility. What many technical people don’t get, and I think the IT industry can be one of the very worst examples of this (the medical profession are much worse), is the boundary between different specialities. They can become so specialist they lose sight of their profession exists to solve problems, and these problems often involve project managent, and often involve a very wide variety of clients. Your job really is to make the impossible possible, the difficult easy, and inform the client so they can make decisions with consent.
My client base runs from multi-millionaires to people stuck in last resort jobs. It’s amazing really how much of their success or lack of is down to blind luck and when and where they were born. Also don’t confuse educational intelligence with inherent intelligence or Saville Row suits with emotional maturity.
I can and have discussed technical issues and concepts and strategies with clients but in all honesty they are not that interested. I can’t tell you how frustrating this is. But then I’ve had other clients completely surprise me. It’s probably the biggest wrench of my life to go from having complete control of projects from blank sheet to finished product to more of an influencing and support role but this is why I am paid the big bucks for not a lot. I’m not saying I’m any good at it but this is what clients perceive. I provide a space where clients can feel they are not battling the system and can feel more confident about themselves which results in less stressed executive decisions and a sigificant rise in productivity. Some clients listen and other don’t but this is the same with anything. I’ve found clients who don’t listen tend to be the clients you read about in the newspaper for all the wrong reasons i.e. they went bust, they got found out not being good at their job while costing their company millions in the process, or they carried around stresses and idiocies and got themselves in hot water,
Technology is easy as it does what its told. People are a lot harder for all the reasons I’ve listed.
I would also caution anyone not to make assumptions about clients. You never know what they have done in life or where they have been and this may not have been their first job. You don’t know who they talk to and you don’t know who their friends are. Quite a lot can be going on in the background you don’t know about. I’ve had clients who are extremely politically well connected or knew people who knew people. Just because they are not telling you their business doesn’t mean they don’t have a clue. This is an important element in policy, plant, and people. Tech anyone gets, people are meh, but policy matters too. If they are the owner of a business or a member of a trade body or somesuch they may act on problems and start making waves. after discussing policy problems with clients I’ve had clients do this. It doesn’t always change things or at least lead to anything immediate but it does show they are paying attention. I’ve had multiple clients issues later show up in the newspapers. The fact is no matter what my skillbase nobody is going to listen to me but they will listen to them.
HollyB,
I don’t follow what you’re getting at. Underestimating my clients how? They’ve expressed their opinion to me and I’m just relaying it here to respond to malxau. Regarding the technophobic owner, it wasn’t meant as an insult but an apt description the owner I was referring to would agree with. I wasn’t passing judgement on those who oppose change and frankly I also think we can be subjected to useless changes.
Same here. Some clients are interested in how things work whereas others don’t care how as long as it does.
To be honest I’m confused about what assumptions you think I’ve made about them though?
Cinnamon uses the Windows/KDE style single panel setup (application launcher and taskbar in one), and Mate uses the Gnome2 double panel setup (application launcher panel and taskbar panel).
Nice trolling. “One of the two great alternatives”. Nothing wrong with Mate or Cinnamon but there are quite a few other options, some better and more popular than these two.
Maybe he meant derivates of Gnome.
For the overwhelming majority of users Cinnamon and Mate (primarily via Linux Mint) are the alternatives. They provide a relatively large sweetspot when you’re discussing the majority of people whether coming from a Windows or Mac OS platform versus Linux. Hardcore Linux users are a teeny tiny number of people compared to the pool of potential users. “Oh noes” the perma revolutionaries, edgelords, and kneckbeards wail.
Now if the rest of the system could be made usable without a vertical learning curve and user guides existed so you didn’t need to have “magical knowledge” of obscure libraries and kernels and God knows what else… That or fielding attitude from offiandos blowing machine gun snot bubbles in red faced foot stamping rage over IHV drivers not supporting idea of the week.
Sounds good! It would be nice to gave an idea what the numbers are.
In comparison Google were boasting of their latest Andoid OS release saving significant procesor time. All good but they never provided a basline so shaving 20% off something which may have trebled for no added gain is something I expect they are keeping quiet about. People also forget that Microsoft ditched probably the most efficient desktop software implemention they ever wrote after Windows 7 for no particular reason.
One of my old phones is now really sluggish for reasons I cannot fathom so I’m doing a factory reset back to Android 4.3 just to see how it compares. I only use it as a phone for voice calls and sms and email so security is no big deal. I know what I need to install or turn off to make it safe. If and when they turn 3G it’s toast anyway. It’s had a good ten years and it still has another 10 or more years of life left so I’m ticked off about this.
Let’s define who we are talking about. Is it power users, intermediate users, or general users? I’m assuming you mean general users, people who may need a few applications and web browser.
Also let’s define what kind of distro we’re talking about. Is it Gentoo, Arch, or Fedora? Gentoo and Arch are super technical, but Fedora and OpenSuse are really docile.
I’ll go ahead and throw out this nugget: Ubuntu isn’t a good distro to reference. Ubuntu is garbage, and they regularly break things because their release engineering is awful.
I run Fedora, and it requires very little maintenance. I run updates regularly, semi-annual version bumbs which are run in place, and it keeps running. I have servers to do weird stuff with, so I don’t do anything odd with my desktop. I need it to work, and Fedora works.
I tried using CentOS as a workstation, but that is a lot of work to maintain.
That’s not the case unless people are going to be compiling stuff not in the repos or using stuff which needs realtime guarantees.
Flatpak takes care of the library problem, and it’s specifically built for dealing with desktop applications. Flatpak also abstracts the distro details to make packaged software fairly universal.
The realtime patches not being merged as of 2021 is a valid criticism, but this mostly affects people doing professional AV and embedded stuff. Neither of which are especially mainstream.
It would be nice for a distro to build a real desktop distro with a kernel tuned for low latency and interactivity rather then tuned towards server workloads, like how macOS is tuned to be a desktop/handheld OS, but the stock kernel works well enough for the majority of people.
Keep in mind, I’m not saying there aren’t problems. There are problems, but they are mostly at people layer more then in the technical layers.
Nvidia really is the problem. RH has spent boat loads of money trying to get Nvidia hardware to work with FOSS drivers, while ignoring graphics vendors who want to work with Linux devs, and gotten nowhere. Nvidia refuses to play, and generally holds progress back.
Of course, I would base a desktop OS on FreeBSD and Arcan if I could wave a magic wand to make it happen.
My basic rules for having a good time with Linux or other alt OSes:
– Buy AMD or Intel CPUs, GPUs
– Buy Intel NICs
– The iGPU is perfectly adequate for most people
Not the most performant setup in some cases, but they easiest to acquire and run.
Flatland_Spider,
That’s one of the things I hear very often as a criticism against linux, but in my head I’m wondering what in the world is someone doing that the things being complained about even come up? I deal will dependency issues because I’m a developer who installs a lot of stuff from source, but otherwise normal users who use snap/flatpak/repos/steam/etc don’t generally need to care how things work under the hood.
Yeah, hardware vendors are often an obstacle. Linux gets around that with a lot of reverse engineering, but the fact that hardware manufacturers don’t work with linux has caused many problems for FOSS 🙁
People know what I’m talking about so I’m not going to spend time arguing it or going around in circles. I’m just not going to like a system which is an exercise in hazing and the ordinary none technical user certainly isn’t.
As for my old Android phone I use as a desk phone a good flush got rid of the lag. On reflection a system cache clean may have fixed it but who knows? I disabled all the junk and only added or updated essential stuff. It’s now good for the basics and as snappy as the day it came out of the factory. But for 3G going the way of the Dodo at some point or video comms which is ever changing for no good reason and which I don’t use on this phone anyway it would be good pretty much forever.
Getting vaguely back on topic I installed Nova as usual. It goes on all my phones so I have the same interface. It also gets rid of that Touchwiz nonsense on one phone.
HollyB,
I wasn’t clear about it what you were referring to either though. Most normal users stick to the managed repos and stores, right? That’s the expectation anyways.
I consistently tell people if they require commercial apps, not to use linux because the reality is few commercial vendors support linux. But if we’re talking about software that is officially supported on linux through a managed store or repository, then is there really a widespread problem? For the sake of discussion I think we could use a specific example.
Linux has a very small sweet spot for the average user and even a technical user faces an uphill struggle for anything which falls out of this zone. The whole Linux ecosystem is brittle like this. I honestly don’t know how else to say it and I really really HATE repeating myself.
The bottom line is Linux is going to have to change to have mainstream uptake because umpteen billion users aren’t going to bend for a niche OS.
Borland got a lot of things right but didn’t have enough weight to influence the C++ committee nor did it have a monopoly. Other than that it had some good technology like the VCL (Visual Component Library). Now if you have your portability layer and tools sussed compiling to another platform with one click is stupidly easy. One huge reason why this doesn’t happen is really the fault of Linux.
Game developers have no excuses…
If you cannot grab user or developer mindshare because the sweet spot is too small nothing is going to happen outside of big corporates who want server side on the cheap.
Linux also has near zero political mindshare. At best it’s a trace if it ever gets a mention. Your odds of getting a government ministers secretary to put Linux on the top of their in-tray are not worth mentioning.
Those are the questions which need grasping before anyone starts building another mountain of code. From reading your other comments up thread I’m not sure you get this. It’s easier for you to swing your “expertise” in a technical area around than admit you don’t have skills in management and communication and actually understanding the “lived experience” of your clients. They are telling you things as clear as day yet you’re not hearing it and being very unprofessional.
HollyB,
Ok, but can we have an example? If not then it’s unclear what scenario you mean.
Because if you stick to the stores and repos, then it works well enough even for typical users.
Game developers have a lot of portable options these days and IMHO have been making very good inroads. Things like SDL, unity, etc.
https://itsfoss.com/unity-editor-linux/
We can discuss this in more detail if you like, but I don’t get the impression you want to.
Change how though? Most of the discussion has been around dependency issues, and that certainly would be a problem for anyone doing things manually, but generally most linux users are not doing things manually so I’d like to better understand exactly what problem(s) you are referring to?
As far as huge upgrades to Operating Systems go, I think Amiga OS 3.2 and 4.1FE did the correct amount of improvements without making things completely foreign to the user base. One of the things I first noticed is all the menu entries have keyboard shortcuts now, where 3.1 did not. And Intuition dialogs for what applications are preventing a screen mode change actually says what that application is!
These are the iterative things tgat users appreciate. Look at the huge failure of Windows 8. People don’t want huge paradigm shifts in general.
Now as far as Gnome-shell goes. I actually like it, it stays out of my way. It did take some getting used to. I have never really liked the Windows paradigm, and geew up using TOS/GEM on the ST. So definitely prefer an application centric desktop, with just a task switcher, as I don’t need a task bar.
The absurd amount of whitespace in Gnome 3 (which has gotten even worse with time) drove me from Gnome to XFCE, then back to KDE, which was my desktop of choice from pre-1.0 to 3.4-ish, in 2016 or so. I haven’t used MATE but it looks rather OK, although a bit dated perhaps.
Tuxie,
I like XFCE, it hits a good design balance and I appreciate things that are lightweight 🙂
You can kind of fix the whitespace issues with different themes (shell or gtk in general). Now if you want to complain about terrible design and a waste of space, look at Teams, which limits how wide you can stretch it. Sure the window stretches all over the place, but the content inside maxes out somewhere a wide phone might… or just look at the hige amount of websites that only dynamically resize to a certain amount, then it is wasted space.
Got to love how the monitor / tv industry pushed us all for having wider and wider screens, but using the web has gotten more and more toward being taller (for mobile device viewing)
My rant for the day on wasted screen space…
@leech
It seems a few people have got carried away with whitespace. They forget the design criteria for usable interactive screens and static print are different. White space isn’t good simply because it is white space and more white space is better, as you note Teams is guilty of. White space operates within its own constraints and exists for a reason. Once you start messing with this it is not white space.
As for widescreens I fidn the extra width more useful. Before complaining about the lack of height my 15″ laptop has as much height as a square laptop screen from back in the day plus the extra width. Nostalgia is getting to you. If you want more height buy a 17″. They do exist.
leech,
I totally agree. Teams is guilty of it but it’s just one application. However the widescreen monitor situation ends up wasting real estate for many applications.
Some monitors even use the the aspect ratio used by theaters, which would be ok for film I guess but all too often this width is totally wasted on code, documents, websites, photos, etc. You can scale it up the contents to fit the width, but then you end up with huge fonts and very limited/cropped vertical elements. If you’re word processing, you may be able to adjust the line wrap to display extremely long lines, but such long lines can be tedious to read.
I counted pixels for osnews, and the white space uses an insane 58% of screen width real estate on my screen, and that’s not counting indentation whitespace. Some whitespace is ok but this is too much. I don’t mean to point the finger at osnews, this is what you get as more and more websites are designed for phones like you mentioned. This is pretty typical I don’t find such wide aspect ratios to be optimal for any of my normal desktop use cases, whether it’s code, PDFs, photo editing, etc.
https://postimg.cc/dDLXj4fV
This wouldn’t be nearly as bad using a more reasonable screen ratio, but therein lies another related problem: the monitors I’d prefer are not available in stores. The past two monitors I bought were an emergency (ie because my monitor died) and I didn’t have time for shipping, and the stores literally have nothing but widescreens to sell. I had no choice.
I mean you can get used to that space being wasted, but still…what a waste.
It’s both our rants now 🙂
“MATE is one of the two great alternatives for people who find GNOME 3 and later unpleasant (the other being Cinnamon, my DE of choice).”
Guess I missed it, I though you (Tom) were an Xfce user, maybe you changed, I just didn’t catch that.