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Fedora Adds MATE and Cinnamon Desktops to Main Repository, Releases Beta
Already available in third party repositories, the GNOME 2 fork MATE and GNOME 3 fork Cinnamon will now be included in Fedora 18. From the H: "After almost two months' delay, the Fedora Project has released the first and final beta of Fedora 18. The distribution, which is code-named 'Spherical Cow,' includes the MATE desktop – a continuation of the classic GNOME 2 interface – in its repositories for the first time. Fedora 18's default edition uses GNOME 3.6.2 as its interface and a separate KDE Spin provides the KDE Software Collection 4.9.3; Xfce 4.10 and version 1.6.7 of Linux Mint's Cinnamon are also available from the distribution's repositories."
F17 was the best distro to use on my lap. I'll upgrade when F18 stable lands
Since RedHat uses Fedora as a base when they build their enterprise distribution, is there any chance that MATE will now get there? We're using RHEL 5 and 6 on some desktops, running really good crafted versions of GNOME 2. And I'm not looking forward to the day RHEL 7 comes out with what I assume will be GNOME 3. I like some of the things they are doing, and one day it will probably be as good as GNOME 2; but that day is not now. Getting MATE included into RHEL would certainly be a good thing.
What, no Metro interface?
No doubt this will prompt the weenies to suggest (for the two thousandth time) that everyone who freely chose to work on these individual projects should drop everything, "join forces", and devote their precious time and effort to one unified project. What these people somehow missed -- even though it is blindingly obvious -- is that each of those developers freely chose to work on their project -- based on their own personal goals, not yours. And the reason why all of these projects are individually successful is precisely because those developers want to be working there. They freely choose to be there because they each personally want to be there. Trying to force them to abandon their self-chosen projects cannot possibly result in the same devotion and quality that personal choice has produced.
second step......
After struggling to use Gnome 3 since Fedora officially released it, I recently tried XFCE again and was blown away with how fast and suitable it is. The defaults are good and there are tons of options to customize it back to the similar paradigm Gnome 2 was. I couldn't believe how much faster my machine felt after switching. Even moving Firefox tabs was better!
I gave G3 PLENTY of time and never could feel comfortable with it even after slowly adding extension after extension to get something workable. The visual component of a desktop is important, and the G3 simply hides too much that is necessary to use it. It's like having a car with no dashboard. The so-called "easy"methods to reveal open windows and find applications are hard to discover, require too much input and memory, and are too slow.
After this weekend's pleasurable re-discovery of the improved XFCE, I'm never going back. Gnome doesn't matter any more to me.
There is no need to use a SlashDot sig for SEO...
Fedora is late, as usual, due to its lack of manpower. Compare with the amount of desktop environments supported in openSUSE:
* Afterstep http://software.opensuse.org/package/afterstep
* cinnamon http://software.opensuse.org/package/cinnamon
* GNOME 2 and 3: http://en.opensuse.org/GNOME_repositories
* KDE 3 and 4: http://en.opensuse.org/KDE_repositories http://en.opensuse.org/KDE3
* LXDE http://en.opensuse.org/LXDE_repositories
* MATE http://en.opensuse.org/MATE
* Qt Desktop http://software.opensuse.org/package/razorqt
* sugar http://software.opensuse.org/package/sugar
* xfce http://software.opensuse.org/package/patterns-openSUSE-xfce
Lots of window managers, too: http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/X11:/windowmanagers/openSUSE_12.2
As it is unreliable, buggy, and just plain wrong.
EH! Kind of old news to fedora users
I don't know what version of Cinnamon is available for Fedora 16 but it just crashed my system after using up 14.8Gb of virtual mem. It was promptly deleted as soon as I logged in again.
GNOME 3 had some good bits, the extensibility helped me get around most if not all of the little annoyances, but I felt a 3D-accelerated desktop wasn't my thing. Somehow it just doesn't scale well to multiple screens and doing things like playing video, making everything sluggish - especially because most of the fancy animations and effects don't last long enough to cause the GPU to kick into a higher performance mode (my NVIDIA GPU runs on less than 1/10th the normal clockspeed during normal desktop usage - that's good for power consumption, but a snappy 3D desktop simply needs more than that)
In a moment of boredom I tried XFCE and was immediately reminded how much I liked configurability and a snappy desktop, and I just stuck with it
Requiring dbus on a server that does not run a graphical interface is useless. Plus since fedora *is* gnomeos basically, support for other desktops will be nonexistent.
Personally, I do not really get all the hype around Cinnamon. In my experience, it is unstable, bug ridden and hard to use.
MATE, on the other, works like charm for me. My last linux upgrade was painful voyage trying Ubuntu Unity, Gnome 3, Xfce, Cinnamon... finding no love with either. But then, Mint MATE, I fell in love immediately - everything works out of box as expected.
I have to admit being rather disappointed with XFCE, mostly around the standard desktop tools. I especially missed Nautilus. I ended up back to G3 running in fallback mode and have been really happy with that.
So troll me.
KDE and Razor Qt are the future. Gnome was nice but not anymore. Dolphin is so much better than what Nautilus has to offer. I would say, simply port KDE to LLVM and we'll get a bulletproof desktop system.
I'm all for a more conventional desktop environment, but do any of these alternative use the gnome 3 libraries? Or are we going to basically have 2 versions of gnome installed, one for the UI and one for the apps?
Sure some apps (GIMP in particular) still need the older libraries but the world needs to move to 3.
I tried FC18-beta today in a virtual machine. I chose to install MATE, system tool, and administration tool consequently the install failed miserably. Then I tried just basic X-windows which also failed miserably, leaving me once again unable to login. Here is an advisory about MATE in FC18-BETA http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Common_F18_bugs
I then tried the net install of MATE which also failed, so reluctantly I had to install GNOME 3.6 and GTk3, which I'm trying to avoid, to get a running system to upgrade to MATE.
Once FC18-beta was up and running i usually disable the test-update because they introduce too much instability. So using the ACTIVITIES BS in GNOME-3.6 I find the application that seemed familiar by the icon "Software", yet the previous name was "ADD/REMOVE Software". So I use the "Software" applications to try and install the "gpk-application", yet i came to find out that "Software" applications only shows you the software installed on your system, and their is no menu to figure out WTF are its settings. {FUC YOU GNOME DEVELOPERS}
So before I run yum update I tried to disable test-repos.
# yum repolist
# yum disablerepo=*test* {failed}
So another way to modify the repo list is by using Yumex.
# yum install yumex
So i ran yumex and went to View-Repositories and un-checked "updates-testing" and closed it.
# yum repolist {same FUCING THING, nothing changed FY GNOME-DEVELOPERS}
So what the hell, "I'm feeling lucky"
# yum update
Well I know this is BETA software and hopefully later I'll be able to install MATE without any of the GNOME CRAP{GTK3}.
I really want to use Fedora, but I type in the Colemak keyboard layout, and I can't figure out how to change the system default to Colemak (to work both at the login screen and after logging in).