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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 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.