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GNOME2 Fork MATE Desktop 1.6 Released
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.
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.
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.
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.
GNOME 3 is probably going to be great one day
Microsoft says the same about Metro. And for both, it's hard to find a fitting comment without making sailors blush.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
...that's fine so long as I am running a tablet.
Unfortunately, I haven't quite yet bought into all of this "death of the PC" rhetoric and I still need something that's useful on the kit that I still have.
Of course you will get resistance when you try to force an inappropriate interface on someone. A lot of people aren't actually sheep. This is especially true of Unix users.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
What difference does it make? I use KDE (this week), and all my GTK programs still run fine. There are no compatibility issues to worry about.
You used the word "deploy", which makes it seem like you're concerned with having many systems with identical desktop configurations. In that case, just install the one you prefer to manage. There are many to choose from, including mate ('sudo apt-get install mate').
sig: sauer
From what I'm seeing here the real improvement is that they've cleaned up the older GNOME code and moved deprecated stuff over to glib/gtk+. From a user standpoint it may be insignifcant, but from the maintenance perspective it's probably fantastic.
If Mate had started now you may have point, but it was created while Gnome 3 was still in the absolutely clusterf*ck state right after its release. At that point it was unusable and had no extensions. Even after they added support for extensions they would break all of them with each update. While it is slightly better now those improvement wouldn't of happened if they had no felt the pressure created by people leaving for forks like Cinnamon and Mate.
Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliant as it is damning with light praise.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
That's what eventually sent me to KDE. I was tolerating Gnome-shell and even liking some features. It was the developer's attitudes toward theming and extensions that made me realize that in the long run, we wanted different things. The good side is that I probably never would've givven KDE a fair shot otherwise though. I'm now a big fan. You can configure everything, and the defaults are generally well chosen.
I think the idea with forking everything was that they could rely on the forked programs working correctly inside MATE, instead of attempting to force newer versions of those programs from Gnome 3 to work inside an older desktop environment. Also, it (theoretically) lets you run MATE and Gnome 3 on the same computer without conflicts.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
MATE is probably one of the best examples of how one owns a piece of open source software more then any proprietary software you would typically pay for. The Gnome team decided to take a radical direction in Gnome 3 development. As a user the MATE developers basically said "Thanks for your hard work but I don't really want Gnome 3". And that was that. Anyone using MATE still "own" all the time and effort put into Gnome 2. No one can ever take that away.
Compare this to Windows 8 metro. Many people prefer the windows 7 desktop. One could argue that Windows can't take away their license to Windows 7 in a similar fashion to how Gnome team can't take away peoples copy of Gnome 2. Even ignoring the fact that I bet Windows could take away your copy of Windows 7 if they wanted, software as a standalone package needs to be updated to work with other software. In the physical world at least one could use adapters and such to keep a product useful. This is not available with closed source software and eventually people will have to abandon Windows 7.
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.
Still has issues! Still has issues? Master of the understatement. GNOME 3 is garbage to the core, hatched from diseased minds. Other than that, it's fine.
If you install Gnome3 you get Gnome Shell. Gnome Shell is the Gnome experience.
Well, FWIW, I still prefer Gnome2 to KDE4, but, to be fair, I also preferred KDE3 to Gnome2.
Currently I'm using KDE4, but if MATE has gotten past it's teething problems (it was very slow the last time I installed it, but that's nearly a year ago now), I may switch to it. That would mean, however, downloading a live CD to test, so I may give it some more time.
OTOH, my suspicion is that ElectricSheep still won't work on MATE, and that is one of my wife's requriements for my computer.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Gnome WAS the standard for Linux desktops.
FTFY.
# touch universe # chmod +rwx universe #