GNOME2 Fork MATE Desktop 1.6 Released 86
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.
Re:Pointless fork (Score:5, 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.
Re:Pointless fork (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.
Re:Pointless fork (Score:5, 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.
It's the refactoring. (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:This was a pointless fork... Gnome 3 has mature (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:This was a pointless fork... Gnome 3 has mature (Score:5, 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.
Re:This was a pointless fork... Gnome 3 has mature (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Example of truly owning software (Score:4, Insightful)
> In the physical world at least one could use adapters and such to keep a product useful.
In the hardware world it is called "Forced Obsolescence"
Apple is a master of it. i.e. micro-DVI, PowerPC, etc.
Microsoft keeps trying and failing as businesses reject every other version. i.e. "Don't fix what isn't broken". The ONLY reason to ever update an OS is:
a) security / bug-fixes
b) features / drivers
Sadly, it is Microsoft's best interest to NOT fix/add features so they can continue to sell you new versions which essentially the do the same thing as the previous version, but differently.
Apple is a little saner by standardizing things such as System Preferences. Microsoft doesn't know a fucking thing about consistency.
But yes open-source-software is By the People, For the People. :-)
Meaningless Semantics (Score:3, Insightful)