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GNOME2 Fork MATE Desktop 1.6 Released

Posted by Unknown on from the desktops-for-everyone dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Excerpts from the announcement: 'This release is a giant step forward from the 1.4 release. In this release, we have replaced many deprecated packages and libraries with new technologies available in GLib. We have also added a lot of new features (...) MATE 1.6 is the result of 8 months of intense development and contains 1800 contributions by 39 people, and more than 150 translators.' See the release notes for a list of changes and new features." They've unforked a number of old GNOME 2 libraries, relying instead of technology from GLib/Gtk+ 3 and other projects where it makes sense. None of the new features really stand out on their own, but it looks like there are dozens of small improvements that should make the desktop experience more pleasant.

4 of 86 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Pointless fork by kthreadd · · Score: 4, Insightful

    GNOME 3 is probably going to be great one day, but the problem is that some of us has to deploy new systems now. If you install Debian 7.0 you will get GNOME 3.4, if you install Ubuntu 12.04 you will get GNOME 3.2 and so on. It doesn't matter that GNOME 3.10 will be great, when the version we get is ready as a replacement for GNOME 2. This is a serious problem for organizations which have been able to deploy Linux desktops in large part due to the effort of the GNOME community, and especially GNOME 2. Until GNOME 3 is ready for mass adoption we have to offer GNOME 2 as well. There's many ways to do that, but none of them are great.

  2. Re:Pointless fork by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Pointless according to whom? To you? Well, that's all fine and dandy that you like Gnome 3, but many of us wouldn't touch it with a barge pole. MATE is very much welcome to a sizeable portion of the Gnome userbase.

  3. Re:Pointless fork by jedidiah · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Gnome3 with some tweaks really isn't a replacement for Gnome2. Until that changes (assuming that it ever does), there will always be a point to a separate fork of Gnome2.

    Although the fork never should have been necessary to begin with.

    I should have been able to happily use Gnome2 and Gnome3 side by side. Upgrading my distribution to the current version should never have required that my old desktop be completely trashed.

    YOU don't get to dictate what the rest of us can use.

    --
    A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
  4. Re:This was a pointless fork... Gnome 3 has mature by armanox · · Score: 4, Insightful

    GNOME 3 still has issues. Don't have a supported graphics card? Want to get a useful error message other then "Something crashed, now you must log out?" Want to have a system tray? Nope, not in GNOME 3.

    --
    I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.