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

Way to go.

[Anonymous Coward]

Too many people have problems with GNOME 3. Good to have a choice.

Re:Way to go.

[Anne Thwacks]

But choice == fragmentation! Panic now, before its too late!

Re:Way to go.

[erroneus]

Fragmentation is only bad when we have something everyone already likes and the fragmentation breaks it. Say, for example, a whole project kind of splits up and each goes in a separate direction which are both different from the original direction. Usually everyone loses in that case.

But when a single choice is made to change which most people simply hate, it's bad too. It's not fragmentation but it's still bad for the users and bad for the project.

In the end, it's the interests of the users which make or break a project. People treat projects and children similarly and it's a damned shame. "My child!" "My Project!" "I can do with it what I want!" Wrong. You can't and you shouldn't. It's a community thing and the community has an interest in the results of your work.

Splendid decision

[blind biker]

I was disheartened with the shipwreck that Gnome 3 decided to become, so MATE was a very positive development. And while I'm not a Fedora user (just not my cup of tea), it's a very popular distro, and seeing them adopt MATE added a huge momentum to the project (a bit like when IBM adopted Java - it boosted it enormously).

Re:Splendid decision

[blind biker]

I was able to convert a few from Unity

Must have been hard...

But wait...

[wordsnyc]

Seadog 19 will feature Matey, the DE that comes with a talking parrot (but doesn't support 3D).

Perhaps supporting R100/R200 was a good idea...

[sethstorm]

Given how many decent, albeit old, chips covered by the Gnome 3 blacklist - this shouldn't be a surprise.

In addition, not much was ever said about the blacklist other than "R100/R200/$chip just can't handle it" without specifying how something that worked in Gnome 3.0 didn't work in later versions. The excuse generally has been along the lines of "STFU and enjoy the fallback, since your chip is too old" without a reasonable explanation of why it even happened. Never mind that Gnome 3 goes out of its way to make sure a blacklisted chipset stays in fallback to the best of its ability - without any opportunity to override.

And a round of slow clapping began....

[Picass0]

Thank you for the outbreak of common sense from the Fedora team. I've been using KDE since Gnome 3 arrived.

Kind of sems like a step backwards.

[slackware 3.6]

Fedora was the first to jump on Gnome 3. They should work on getting the kinks out instead of trying to go back in time or trying to be a crappy Mint wannabe with no codecs. My boxes have been geting switched over to Mageia (from F 16 & 17) because fewer updates and more stable with Gnome 3.
If you take away Gnome 3 and Unity you will lose alot of new linux users. New users want something cool and flashy not something that looks like a clone of Windows from years past.

Re:Kind of sems like a step backwards.

[Ignacio]

They should work on getting the kinks out instead of trying to go back in time or trying to be a crappy Mint wannabe with no codecs.

GNOME 3 doesn't have "kinks", it has major usability regressions. They can't be "gotten out", they must be destroyed.

New users want something cool and flashy not something that looks like a clone of Windows from years past.

Only if you want all your new users to be teenage kids.

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.

Car analogy

[gagol]

The vehicle driving interface have not changed much in the last 80 years or so. This has not stopped us to innovate vehicles. Imagine that every 10 years or so, car manufacturers decided that a steering wheel and pedals are out of fashion and should be replaced by something fundamentally different.

The mess we have today in many fields is related to our priorities as a specie. We placed eyecandy before efficiency and this means we place a tremendous amount of energy in entertainment, games and trendy gadgets that sole goals are to steer attention away from real problems by having an entertainment industry so huge.

\

Re:We're all missing the point

[blind biker]

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.

That's bullshit - I was there when Gnome 2 was born. There were some critics, but nowhere near the backlash that accompanies Gnome 3.

Your post reminds me exactly of the Windows Vista apologists: they would say things like "When Windows XP came out, there were just as many people who hated it. like the ones who hate Vista. In the end, it will be a success like XP." Turns out, all those apologists were full of shit, and Vista really is the turd that everybody thought it was.

Re:We're all missing the point

[Anne Thwacks]

By the time that GNOME 3 is mature and more stable, it will have a large userbase again.And Gnome 4 will replace it with new, improved bugs and an incomprehensible UI

FTFY

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:NOT for touch screens

[pscottdv]

I suppose they THINK they are developing for touch screen devices. But they are fooling themselves. I ran into the problems I described within the first 2 minutes of using Gnome 3 on a touch-screen-only device.

That tells me that not one gnome shell developer runs Gnome 3 on a touch-screen-only device. Not one. Seriously. Because if there was such a developer, he or she would have run across the same problem within the first two minutes of use. Connect to encrypted WiFi? Can't be done without a keyboard. Resume from suspend? Again, can't be done without a keyboard. Type a tilda? Can't do it without a keyboard or a third-party on-screen keyboard program.

These aren't subtle little use-cases hiding in the corners. These are major problems that ANYONE attempting to use Gnome 3 on a touch-screen device will run into within the first couple of MINUTES of use. These are problems that the Gnome developers know about (because I have reported them) and that they have refused to address. They don't even comment on the bugs. They just let them sit. For years.

Re:lets hope ubuntu fallows

[Billly Gates]

Wow

If I have to look up a cheat sheet to do such a basic task it is a failure. You can't expect an average Joe to figure this out and learn a new way one the other one works just fine. Same reason they usually prefer XP over win 7 still just because it is familiar more than the fact it is 10 years old.