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It's a real pity Debian wheezy won't have MATE.

Might be worth cutting out the middleman and using the upstream directly. The Mate guys maintain a Wheezy repository:

http://mate-desktop.org/install/#debian

I haven't tried this, but their equivalent Ubuntu repository works very well with 12.04.

It looks like debian developers object to maintaining all the libraries used mate, but the mate project maintains a debian repository.

http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2012/02/msg00257.html
http://wiki.mate-desktop.org/download#debian

I personally doubt that Mate will survive in the long run, but at least it will be interesting to see what happens.

You can get GNOME 2 and these applets back with MATE.

I recently deployed a Debian Testing system and I didn't like GNOME 3. (it reminded me of KDE 4.0's initial release several years ago when everything was glitchy and barely functional) GNOME3 might eventually develop into something usable like KDE 4 did, but it just needs more time and a lot more polish.

If you want to keep using GNOME2, I suggest using MATE. It's basically a renamed GNOME2 fork.

KDE4 caused me to switch to Gnome... and then unity came along and I'm not sure where to go next!

Here?: http://mate-desktop.org/

e.g.:

http://www.howtogeek.com/110052/how-to-install-the-mate-desktop-go-back-to-gnome-2-on-ubuntu/

http://www.webupd8.org/2012/04/mate-desktop-12-released-install-it-in.html

Gnome 2 is still available in a pretty stable form of the Mate Desktop. There are repos available for quite a few distros now. Check the mate desktop's web page. http://wiki.mate-desktop.org/download

Just in case anyone is too lazy to look it up, instructions for adding the repo and installing mate are here:

http://wiki.mate-desktop.org/download

Scroll down to "fedora" and follow the instructions. It's very simple.

yum install http://dl.dropbox.com/u/49862637/Mate-desktop/fedora_17/mate-desktop-fedora/noarch/mate-desktop-release-17-1.fc17.noarch.rpm

yum groupinstall MATE-Desktop

People keep saying it's "buggy," but it's really not, any more than Gnome 2 was. It is quirky, though, as a result of a fork in progress. What I mean is that most mate apps have migrated to mateconf instead of gconf, but some things like compiz are still going to be using gconf, so you have to use both gconf and mateconf at times. But this is no worse than Gnome 3 which is half ported to gnome-settings and half still gconf.

The difference is that Microsoft can deliberately drop support for the older Windows operating system, forcing users to migrate to newer, vastly inferior Windows operating systems. And since their shit is proprietary, no one can "adopt" redevelopment of the abandonware they don't want any more.

But with open source systems, the codebase for Gnome2 can't be made to disappear just because the original developers have developed collective insanity and moved on to the execrable Gnome3. In fact, Gnome2 has indeed been adopted by a new set of developers. Or people can just use a perfectly good replacement. Because with open source systems you're not locked into an official One Way of doing things.

Go here if you want to switch off Unity and GNOME3.

Both Unity and GNOME 3 suck. Neither one works correctly with multiple monitors. Try running 4 monitors on two video cards, TwinView'd and Xinerama'd, and you will understand.

I especially hate the global menu bar in Unity. I can sort of live with the similar design in OS X but Unity does it horribly. I'm not even sure what the difference is but I just couldn't stand Unity even though I'm used to OS X.

I'm actually scared of upgrading my friend's desktop to a newer version of Ubuntu. He's computer illiterate and has been using Ubuntu more-or-less fine for several years now, but I know him and while I can tolerate even the most bone-headed of interface (I used old versions of Mentor Graphics for example) this shit is going to drive him insane and he'll stop using it.

I have been using an Ubuntu 11.10 computer with MATE installed, and I am happy with it. I have removed all the overlay-scrollbar packages and the result is a nice usable GNOME 2.x desktop.

http://mate-desktop.org/

Long-term, the future is probably Cinnamon, which is built on top of the new GNOME 3.x libraries but aims to duplicate the desktop features of GNOME 2.x.

http://cinnamon.linuxmint.com/

steveha

Miss Nautalus? Try Mate http://mate-desktop.org/ as it's Gnome2.

Yea, okay, looks like a dead-end. I'm sticking with xfce.

A little more Googling might lead you to the official site, whiich has a support forum (in English), and actively updated repositories for various distributions:

http://mate-desktop.org/

If you liked Gnome 2, then MATE is an obvious choice:

http://mate-desktop.org/

It's an active fork of Gnome 2, and is included in the current Mint distribution, though you can get a more recent version from the developers' repository (which also supports Debian and Ubuntu):

http://wiki.mate-desktop.org/download

Third party rpms for Fedora 16 are now available too.

If you liked Gnome 2, then MATE is an obvious choice:

http://mate-desktop.org/

It's an active fork of Gnome 2, and is included in the current Mint distribution, though you can get a more recent version from the developers' repository (which also supports Debian and Ubuntu):

http://wiki.mate-desktop.org/download

Third party rpms for Fedora 16 are now available too.

I am all for experimentation and choice. Gnome wants to remove that choice.

If you preferred GNOME 2, you might want to check out MATE. As far as I know, the GNOME Project has done nothing to hinder their efforts.

Gnome 3 is unbelievable crap and a fork is unfortunately necessary.

What angers me is that Debian developers foisted this piece of shit onto Debian testing/unstable (and soon stable) users without providing a way to continue to run Gnome 2.

Gnome 3 is not an upgrade to Gnome 2. It is a lobotomised design without the functionality of Gnome 2. And Fallback mode provides the most ugly, quirky desktop in decades.

Thankfully a partial solution is provided by http://mate-desktop.org/ . This fork provides a beautiful Gnome 2-like environment to continue working in. There are currently IA32 and AMD64 packages available. However Debian is supposed to be a Universal Operating System. I should be able to install Mate on ARM, PPC, etc. Hopefully we will see Mate integrated into Debian in the future so Debian can become a complete Universal Operating System again.

By forcing the elimination of Gnome 3's best competition (Gnome 2) I believe Mate is likely to continue to be a viable fork and Gnome 3 developers have doomed themselves to irrelevance.

I used to believe software development was an incremental process of improvement. In reality misguided developers can cause great harm to existing software ecosystems. Both the Gnome and Debian projects would be better off right now if the developers responsible for forcing Gnome 3 onto Gnome 2 users had slacked off and done nothing with their time.

I wish software developers had a philosophy of "first do no harm".

Have the tried the MATE fork of Gnome2? http://mate-desktop.org/

But I don't like Unity. How do I get Ubuntu with the original Desktop?

http://wiki.mate-desktop.org/download#ubuntu
http://mate-desktop.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAT%C3%89_(desktop_environment)

But I don't like Unity. How do I get Ubuntu with the original Desktop?

http://wiki.mate-desktop.org/download#ubuntu
http://mate-desktop.org/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAT%C3%89_(desktop_environment)

...but he really just wants the old Ubuntu back.

He can have it with just three commands:

http://wiki.mate-desktop.org/doku.php/download#ubuntu

More details:

http://mate-desktop.org/

...but he really just wants the old Ubuntu back.

He can have it with just three commands:

http://wiki.mate-desktop.org/doku.php/download#ubuntu

More details:

http://mate-desktop.org/

Yes. The project leader of Linux Mint is also the project manager of MATE desktop. AFAIK, it has a few developers working full time on it to iron out the bugs.