Guest post by As of the release of Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet Beta 1, Ubuntu MATE is now officially a Canonical project, alongside the likes of Kubuntu, Xubuntu, and friends. MATE is the continuation of GNOME 2.
As of the release of Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet Beta 1, Ubuntu MATE is now officially a Canonical project, alongside the likes of Kubuntu, Xubuntu, and friends. MATE is the continuation of GNOME 2.
Cut my Linux teeth on Ubuntu back in the day when it first appeared. Loved the Gnome 2.x desktop Ubuntu began life with. Found the Unity desktop, once it became Ubuntu’s default offering, completely off putting as did a great many others. So I moved to Linux Mint as soon as they made MATE (Gnome 2.x reinvented and refined) their default, and thought I’d never look back. However, with Ubuntu MATE 15.04 now officially part of the Ubuntu family, and the developers retrospectively making Ubuntu MATE 14.04.1 LTS available, I’ve installed the LTS version on one of my machines and find it the equal of Linux Mint with just a bit of tweaking. Of course it’s Ubuntu based, as is Linux Mint, so no big surprise there. Bottom line, at least for me, is whether one chooses Ubuntu MATE or Linux Mint with the MATE desktop, the traditional desktop metaphor so many of us enjoyed in the Gnome 2.x desktop is again at our fingertips, and that’s something to be celebrated!
Of all the current Linux DEs I, too, find Mate the most pleasing. It’s clean, efficient and easy to comprehend, and it doesn’t try to shove all sorts of fancy new concepts and tools in your face without even explaining what they do or how to use them properly *cough* K-something! *cough*
Glad to hear that it’s now an official part of Ubuntu.
Edited 2015-03-03 02:23 UTC
It’s astonishing how much work and effort gets wasted in linux with everybody duplicating every one else’s effort. If these people would just learn to get along and actually accomplish something the linux de could actually be something.
All you have to do to make gnome3 look identical to g2 is run in g2 mode just like the new RHEL does, which is what I use.
Do these mate people know what a nightmare there causing keeping the old g2 libs alive, what kind do a nightmare they cause for devs as yet another God damned DE to have to test everything under.
WTF is wrong with G3 in fallback mode, it works better than G2 ever did.
you want devs to take your platform seriously? Grow up and learn to work together
SzoylentGreen,
Hmm, while I can appreciate your criticism, your labels are reversed. The “yet another freaking desktop” label must logically be applied to the G3 project, because it came after G2 and ditched everything to start over from scratch, remaining functionally behind G2 for a very long time.
To be honest, when I tried G3 fallback mode it was terrible. It was insulting that gnome would try to pass it off as a serious substitute for G2. Maybe it’s improved, but I didn’t find it acceptable at all. Was there anyone who did?
Personally I don’t mind changes, especially improvements under the hood, but with G3 they were so dead set on shoving new paradigms that it alienated many users. That was a bad approach, IMHO, and it divided the community. Moving forward, hopefully there will be a path that reconciles everyone’s differences, but we might not be there yet.
I would go as far as saying.. as long as Linux has more than one graphical user interfaces, those are a serious hindrance to desktop adoption. Single GUI, audio, network etc. are considered to be integral part of any system, not something to be separately tinkered with.
[This is in response to the comment from atomic. I can’t make any sense of the way osnews displays comments.]
When an organisation adopts Linux, they tend to adopt a single distro, i.e. they commit to a single desktop.
The existence of other desktops doesn’t present an insurmountable problem here, any more than the existence of Mac OS X prevents people using Windows.
Edited 2015-03-03 15:20 UTC
There’s a dropdown above the comments to pick different ways of showing comments. Flat is “all comments in order of posting”, while Threaded and Nested groups replies together. Try all three and see if any of them makes more sense.
I use Nested, and have the score thing set to -5 (so no comments are collapsed) – but Flat is better for seeing what’s new.
Edited 2015-03-03 15:36 UTC
I recently went back home to Linux Mint MATE after having spent several years on Parsix and Sabyon. Parsix became too Gnome 3 centric for my tastes and Sabayon became too unstable for my tastes. The MATE desktop just feels like home. Linux Mint knows how to brew an amazing and stable desktop! And with Compiz (I know users may grown) feels fun and familiar. As an old skool Linux boy, I love it! Gnome 3 has lost it, seriously; I don’t know where they’re going (devs, heads up.) I like KDE but even it feels like too much at times. MATE is the Goldilocks equivalent of “just right”. I’m glad gnome 2.x was forked and I anticipate many good things to come of it.
Are useless to me if it doesn’t support a vertical panel, which neither do.
MATE most definitely supports vertical panels, as did Gnome2.
https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-panel/issues/157
That’s not what i call support. If that has changed, please let me know.
I don’t normally use Mate, and I don’t have access to Mint Mate , but on my virtual machine of Ubuntu Mate, if the panel is wide enough, the clock will turn to be horizontal, and the Windows list is functional. I don’t know how to get a gradient. That bug report is for 1.4, we’re now on 1.8, so…
After reading a bit more, it looks like Mate does have it, but Cinnamon doesn’t. My bad.
Although the FOSS fanboys shout that it’s good to have choice, I will say that fragmentation will always hurt linux and its adoption. With that being said, MATE took long to get where it is now and perhaps missed the window to foster those orphans of Unity and GNOME 3. Most people bit the bullet and suffered through Unity and GNOME 3 pain. Quite a few got used to those alien desktops.
I myself actually like Unity interface but I have to admit it is such utter crap after all. And I will just tell you when the thing starts to fail on me: when you need to drop a file from file manager to any other window application so it can be opened. No, this kind of operation won’t work without you going through a mind apnea.
My hopes are now with KDE Plasma 5. That’s what is going to be my only one default desktop interface when it is properly stable, and I hope KDE team does not ever blow up again, because they are actually doing very good now and they have been praised by demanding folks like Dedoimedo, who’s always criticizing the stupidities done by the developer community.
I wish KDE Plasma 5 and MATE the best. Really. I don’t know where XFCE is going to at this moment, but if they improve that creepy old interface quirks, I might try use this too. I think 2 or 3 desktops are going to be just fine. More desktops or distros, or more of this tiresome propaganda that the more choices the best, won’t serve of anything.
I really remember back in 1999, in many places, people were predicting Linux to be the second most popular desktop. And it never made past the 1% or 6% (according to Microsoft) bar. Fragmentation has its share on the numbers we’ve seen.
Edited 2015-03-04 05:59 UTC
While fragmentation could be seen as an adoption issue I suspect corporate America could pick a winner so on the corporate adoption front I doubt it is much of an issue. I bet a quick glance around the net would show all sorts of ways to change and customize your Windows desktop, Classic Shell comes to mind, but most corporations just ignore these “enhancements”.
I think starting multiple projects to see which designs work is more of a feature than a bug. However, you could say it spreads the developers thinner than needed once we have one or two well designed base projects.
The problem with trying to fix the issue of fragmentation is obviously what should we prune and will the end users be happy with the alternative.
We could look at a past success story to see where future defragmentation could be possible. When LXDE and Razor QT merged to pool their development resources on a new QT desktop users were surprisingly accepting. It probably helps that Razor was a young project and LXDE was going to change UI toolkits anyway. XFCE and Mate may be good candidates for merger as their goals now seem to overlap as relatively lightweight, fairly customizable, classic desktops using the GTK toolkit and both needing to make the switch to GTK3. However there are a lot of differences that would have to be addressed.