Fedora 18 To Feature the GNOME2 Fork MATE

dsinc writes "It's not just Mint: Fedora will also feature MATE in their upcoming release (Fedora 18). According to Fedora's Dan Mashal, 'many users have expressed interest in this feature since Fedora 15 in which Fedora was switched from GNOME 2 to GNOME 3.'" This follows shortly after news that MATE 1.4 has been released. New features includes file sharing over bluetooth, updated backends for mate-keyring and libmatekeyring, new themes for the notification daemon, and improvements to the Caja file manager. MATE is being included in Sabayon as well.

Comments

We're all missing the point

[supersloshy]

This is being blown way out of proportion. We're all acting like this means that Fedora is dropping GNOME 3 for MATE or something crazy like that. From what I can tell they're simply just porting the packages to Fedora, nothing more. Maybe they'll offer a version with MATE as the default configuration, but this doesn't show any signs of replacing GNOME 3 in the future. Lets be realistic and read the articles, folks.

Also, unrelated, but I feel like the GNOME 3 hate is really blown out of proportion. Sure, some users were driven away, but the exact same thing happened with GNOME 2 and people called it trash and crap and whatever else. By the time that GNOME 3 is mature and more stable, it will have a large userbase again. I can guarantee it. I, personally, really love it as it is, especially how easily extensible it is. I don't know another desktop that allows so many customization options through extensions like that. You can really change near everything with a little tweak and you can write one yourself in minutes.

NOT for touch screens

[pscottdv]

For people who like their desktop to have familiar features rather than being dumbed down for touch screens?

There is no way Gnome 3 is designed for touch screens. Or at least, not for touchscreen-only computers. I use Fedora 17 on a pen-based computer (fujitsu stylistic) and I can tell you that if it were not for the fingerprint reader on it, Fedora would be *UNUSABLE*. Whenever Gnome 3 needs a password to connect to WiFi or to unlock the screen or unlock following suspend, THERE IS NO WAY TO ENTER THE PASSWORD! The password windows captures all mouse input so it is NOT possible to bring up an onscreen keyboard.

So lets stop pretending Gnome 3 shell is for tablet-type computers. It CANNOT BE USED ON A COMPUTER WITHOUT A KEYBOARD.

Oh, and when one IS able to use the on-screen keyboard, it has is no tilda (~) character. Not that you would ever need to type a tilda on a unix-like operating system.

I've filed bugs on all these complaints, but there has been no action.

Are you listening Gnome team?

Re:Kind of sems like a step backwards.

[jc79]

Eh? No one's removing Gnome 3 from Fedora. MATE is being added as an extra desktop environment. Gnome 3 will still be the default. This is an additional feature, not a replacement.