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MATE To Make It Into Debian Repositories
sfcrazy writes "Fans of the MATE desktop environment, which is a fork of Gnome 2, will be happy to know that MATE is scheduled to be included in the official Debian repositories. Early 2012, it was requested that MATE be included in said repositories, and almost 2 years later, it appears we're almost there."
Ubuntu is hardly a successor to Debian. It's more of a hanger on. Debian will be around long after Canonical goes bankrupt.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
We don't hate ubuntu for being mainstream, unless you mean mainstream like Lady Gaga is mainstream. I wouldn't invite ubuntu home to meet the folks these days (I did once when ubuntu and I were younger).
Mate
How many times will they check MATE before it's done?
"Lack of speed can be overcome. In the worst case by patience." --Znork
Quit being such a pawn.
MATE is definitely not "mainstream". The mainstream follows hot trends, like the tablet-ification and dumbing-down of desktop GUIs. MATE is the opposite of this. MATE is an admission that the desktop metaphor was already perfected 10 or 15 years ago, and that what we really need is a stable, polished, feature-complete implementation of it. Cinnamon and XFCE are in the same camp, with cinnamon opting to use newer technology to achieve a similar result.
MATE going into the debian repository is a great thing. It gives credit to the notion that certain design concepts and certain software, although "dated", is so practical, sensible, and useful that it's worth keeping around for years to come.
More the bowdlerized version.
Best wishes,
Bob
> A problem with Linux in general is there is simply too much choice and no apparent standardization.
Yet the thing you are screeching about right now is the very essence of "consistency" in terms of the principle that "computer interfaces should be consistent". This project is a response to others running off the rails and trying to follow the latest trend no matter how absurd it is.
MATE is what truly conforms to formal academic notions of proper UI design. So do the standard Unix shells.
MATE will be less of a shock to people used to the last 15 years of Windows interfaces. It will be less confusing than the flavor of the month from Ubuntu, Microsoft, or Apple.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
MATE is fantastic for those of us who liked GNOME 2 and want to continue using it and receiving updates for it. They're not including it by default from what I can tell, they're just making it an option to install in the repos. I'm pretty happy about this, I'll definitely be using it.
"mongo only pawn, in game of life"
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
The original article seems to be Slashdotted (hey, can we still do that?!), but from the MATE blog:
http://mate-desktop.org/blog/2013-11-08-debian-mate-packaging-team/
"The MATE Team is very happy to say hello to the new Debian MATE Packaging Team, that is working hard to get MATE included into the next release of Debian...First packages are already in the repositories and there are many others in ftp-master NEW queue."
which links to:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=708385#31
"The plan is to provide MATE inside the Debian archive before the end of the year (if the FTP master time will find enough time to review our uploads)."
Of course if you don't mind using the upstream repository, you can install it right now:
http://wiki.mate-desktop.org/download
That's going a little bit far to say it was perfected 10-15 years ago. I'd assert that it is more a recognition that the attempts to go beyond what we had 10-15 years ago have taken us in the wrong direction.
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
I would have said the vajazzled version.
Violence is like duct tape. If it doesn't solve the problem, you didn't use enough.
what the fuck are you talking about. Ubuntu is not a successor by any means, it sits firmly downstream.
If debian where to go away tommorow, Ubuntu would go away in 6 months, because they still pull packages from debian to make their new versions.
Also, debian runs on a wide variety of hardware Ubuntu won't run on, in fact one of the widest variety and its a better general purpose OS.
Also, Debian has the lead market share in the server world, so I'd love for you to tell all the companies who run debian-stable servers they need to ditch them for ubuntu-server.
http://w3techs.com/blog/entry/debian_is_now_the_most_popular_linux_distribution_on_web_servers
I think you've lost track of reality. You don't even know what a hipster is.
You are mistaken. XFCE (although I use it myself) has certainly never been mainstream, and LXDE (are you kidding?) has never even been on the radar. Here in the linux world, although there are many GUIs to choose from, gnome and KDE are the only two that have ever remotely qualified as "mainstream" (and maybe FVWM if you want to go way back). This is coming from someone who has used linux almost exclusively since '97, and has seen the entire evolution with his own eyes.
The problem in this instance is that MATE is basically a fork of GNOME which was already in the repository. It's my understanding that a lot of stuff had to be sorted out to prevent clashes and to ensure that Debian doesn't end up with a bunch of garbage packages that will have to be maintained for the next Debian release.
If you want a quick-to-adapt distro, try Ubuntu. It was so quick to adapt that it quickly adapted a whole new desktop environment as default overnight once during a routine system update.
The basic Unix approach is almost universal, both Linux and Windows using a bash command line, and just about everything but Windows being built on a Unix style base. That approach has stood the test of time in the face of new bright ideas. Likewise, I would say Windows 2000 prior to the XP bubblegum theme was pretty much the desktop+start button approach done right. The 2D array of icons of iOS and Android will, I imagine again be seen as a long term successful design. The problem is that big business is desperate to find the 'next big thing' to try to monopolise and own it to maximise their bottom line.
Abandoning old ideas as 'dated' is a mark of the 'planned obselescence' business model that much of modern industry has adopted: effectively moving from the 'buy stuff' model to the 'rent stuff and surrender control' model, that is good for business, bad for consumers, but easy to force if government regulation doesn't stop this market degeneracy.
John_Chalisque
This is good news. GNOME2/MATE is a very nicely evolved traditional desktop, that I am sure has more person hours of testing than all the other linux desktops put together (being the default in most major distros for years).
Having it in the official repos, saves having to hunt down the addresses of the repos when installing. A strength of debian is how broad the repos are. Thanks for the hard work folks.
I design UIs occasionally. What iconography would you suggest replace the floppy disk for save? The down arrow and some bits? No, That's download. Why all the bucking for naught? Must technology be averse to its own history to the extent that we can't just have a beloved memorable data store remain the symbol for storage, simply because tweens haven't ever used one and Sony stopped making them? I still use floppies daily but I make OSs as a hobby, so admittedly I'm an extreme outlier. Most folks don't know what a hard drive looks like. They equate optical disks to burning and playing media. I've still got a tape drive for my big backups, but icons sporting a cassette or reel-to-reel are confusing and more out dated than the floppy -- The grand ol' floppy who's drive access sounds heralded the explosion of accessible computing for humanity.
When holographic Crystal Storage becomes the new de-facto storage standard a gleaming spinning cube will be a suitable iconic replacement representation. Until then, you get to see a floppy -- Because nothing else makes any damn sense, and words take up more space than icons.
What the real problem is is that GNOME 3 is different enough from GNOME 2 that it should have been called something else entirely.
Done. I'm using on a RHEL box, but I install from sources. You don't have to wait so much if you just learn to use your computer.
I used to use GNOME 2 & found that the GNOME devs kept dropping useful features, then GNOME 3 came along and was essentially a triumph of FASHION over FUNCTIONALITY. I initially fled to xfce, now I use MATE.
I have 30" monitor, I have 35 virtual desktops of which about half are in use. An unused virtual desktop is blank with a bland background, and my 2 highly customised panels are always hidden unless I need to access them.
GNOME 3 is very cluttered. and gets in the way of easy use. GNOME devs seems to think that what they want is more important than letting me do things the way I find best - they have Apple's disease! I am glad that I was not supporting clients with GNOME 2 - as the change from a sort of working Desktop Environment, to the total disaster of GNOME 3 was the most depressing & annoying change I've ever had to suffer in Linux.
MATE started as a clone of GNOME 2 with the useful parts added back in, but now they are adding new features in there own right.
Yes, it's true. Debian is part of Ubuntu's ecosystem. Just like oxygen is part of my ecosystem. If I don't get adequate oxygen, I'll die. If Ubuntu doesn't get adequate Debian, then Ubuntu will die. The revers is not true, of course. If oxygen doesn't get any of me, oxygen won't die - nor will Debian die for lack of Ubuntu.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
How hard is it to change the frigging icon? MOST people who haunt slashdot are capable of switching out an icon. If we were on Yahoo, or Twitter, or Facebook, I might expect to see a complaint about an "outdated" icon. But, this is SLASHDOT!!
It would be interesting to take a poll, to see how many slashdot readers can do simple tasks, such as substituting an icon. I had that capability waaaaay back, on Windows 3.11. I'm fairly sure that I could have done it on DOS 3.1, but I'm not quite certain - I can't actually remember doing it on any program that preceded Windows for Workgroups. (before anyone asks, I wasn't a Linux guy back then)
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Actually, Mate is designed quite well for people who use multiple applications at the same time. If you'll look at those images again, you'll see the lower right hand corner of the screen has four virtual desktops iconified on the panel. I routinely use three of the default four. Further, I have two monitors, so switching between those three desktops means that I am working with six screens. Mate is as good as, or maybe better than, Gnome or KDE for multitaskers.
The fact is, those screenshots were taken for a very specific purpose - to familiarize the neophytes with Mate's appearance. I introduced my wife to Mate quite some time ago, and she's happy with it. She's the multi-tasker from hell - like many women are. (and I'm getting senile - I can't remember HOW LONG AGO I switched her to Mate!)
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
This is rare and will continue to be rare unless there is a perceived stable, standardizzed desktop offering.
You mean like Microsoft's new "standardized" desktop offering, which is a complete sea change from their previous version?
With Linux, you don't have that problem. No one can force you to adopt a crappy new desktop offering when you're a Linux user; you always have the ability to keep using what you're using now, or change distros to one that suits you better. Users happy with Gnome2 are not forced to move to Gnome3; they're free to switch to distros using MATE (or Cinnamon) if they prefer those. That's something you can't do with Apple or Microsoft.
Oh please.
First off, there's really only one Linux kernel version that distros are using. Except for some weird embedded stuff, no one sticks with older or odd branches of the Linux kernel, and they generally use the latest thing available. The only differences between distros would be because they don't all release releases at the exact same time.
Secondly, there may be "thousands" of distros, but only a handful that actually have a lot of users and get a lot of mindshare and support: Ubuntu, Fedora, Mandriva, Mint (with a few different variants), Debian, OpenSUSE, and that's about it. There's also Arch, Gentoo, and Slackware, which have much lower adoption, and a bunch of obscure or special-use distros (such as DD-WRT, which is only for routers, or Knoppix which is only a liveCD/DVD distro and mainly used as a rescue system). The vast majority of Linux desktop users probably only use 3-5 distros. And some of these are actually derived from other distros (Mint is the poster child of this), with very few actual changes of their own. ...which brings us to package managers: with only a handful of serious distros, that means there's only a handful of package managers that get much use, and in reality it's only two, dep/apt and rpm/yum.
So in reality, things don't look much different between the Linux and BSD worlds, and in fact, Linux looks more standardized than BSD since it only has one active kernel.
You've got me confused. Is there a new world order or something? When did Windows adopt bash? It's true, I can't even begin to imagine using Windows without Cygwin, but Cygwin is not Windows.
Agree 100% with everything else.
I'm not too worked up over KDE4's bloat given the cheapness of RAM and disk space, but KDE4 lacks one simple thing. There should be a single simple option for the user to set: "Give me KDE3 look and feel all the way, but with the KDE4/Qt4 improved codebase plus the obvious underpinning improvements". I.e., it would get rid of the compositing stuff, Plasma stuff, animation stuff - a plain desktop as folder, plus panels. Basically a quick, simply way to disable all the stuff which is utterly pointless to the task at hand, and in fact gets in the way, at least for some major subset of users.
It is really quite a daunting undertaking to identify and properly manipulate all the distributed settings necessary to accomplish this choice. The capability is there; it's just too hard to accomplish the way it is now. I love the detailed configurability, but there needs to be at least one meta-configuration setting. It's not like it would be hard to code or confuse anybody.
That should pretty much satisfy everybody beyond a few religious adherents to hardware/software minimalism.
How about the word 'Save'? Why does everything have to be an icon?
On the news about MATE, that's good to see. Fwiw, I dumped Ubuntu for Lubuntu (LXDE) as soon as I saw Unity. While I think the water's a bit muddy (MATE, LXDE, XFCE...) it's still nice to see the options there.
Jesus told him, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one can come to the Father except through me. - John 14:6 NLT
It's good to see a major distribution acknowledging the efforts of the MATE team. Hopefully other distributions will follow (Arch Linux, I'm looking at you)