[Discuss] MATE

[John Abreau]

I tried Mate again yesterday, and this time the mouse focus worked. The glitch I experienced when I tried it earlier in the week must have been due to installing and testing all the other alternatives to Gnome Shell that were in the F17 yum repos. All except for Enlightenment, which installed but wouldn't start due to packaging mismatches. And KDE, which installed but didn't appear in gdm's sessions menu. 



Sent from my iPad

On Jan 19, 2013, at 7:12 AM, John Abreau <jabr at gapps.blu.org> wrote:

> For me, the core issue is that after discovering direct evidence of the Gnome 3 development team's broken philosophy, I can no longer give them the benefit of the doubt and trust that Gnome 3 will eventually become a good citizen. 
> 
> 
> 
> On Jan 18, 2013, at 10:14 PM, Tom Metro <tmetro+blu at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> John Abreau wrote:
>>> Mate looked promising; it would have been my preferred choice...
>> 
>> I've written about MATE here before, and briefly evaluated it.
>> 
>> I don't quite get why someone would prefer it. Both MATE and Cinnamon
>> have the same objective - provide a GNOME 2-like environment. The big
>> difference is that MATE is built on a GNOME 2 fork, and Cinnamon uses
>> GNOME 3 code.
>> 
>> Initially, MATE made more sense, as it required less work to get
>> something into a usable state. But Cinnamon has since caught up, to some
>> extent. It still feels unfinished, but it is usable. I think most power
>> users are better off making the jump to Cinnamon and providing developer
>> feedback for it, rather than further perpetuating the GNOME 2 code base.
>> 
>> But this opinion is largely based on the assumption that newer is
>> better. That GNOME 3, despite what stupidity might be happing with the
>> core developers at the UI layer, underlying architecture is improved.
>> That could certainly be a bad assumption, and I'd welcome references to
>> material that supports or refutes it.
>> 
>> The other argument in favor of MATE would be concern that Cinnamon won't
>> attract enough developers to keep progressing forward a GNOME 3 fork,
>> given the way the upstream developers clearly doesn't want to be
>> cooperative. My guess is that MATE can be sustained with fewer
>> resources, although it'll likely remain fairly static.
>> 
>> What is Mint using as their default desktop these days? If it is still
>> MATE, will it be Cinnamon in the next release? Their choice should be a
>> good indicator of their opinion of how ready they think Cinnamon is, and
>> which they see as the future direction.
>> 
>> -Tom
>> 
>> -- 
>> Tom Metro
>> Venture Logic, Newton, MA, USA
>> "Enterprise solutions through open source."
>> Professional Profile: http://tmetro.venturelogic.com/
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