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.

As a mate desktop user

[lister king of smeg]

as a mate desktop user i an glade to see progress, I do think though that they made a mistake early on forking most every gnome project when simply forking the desktop, panel, file browser and maybe window manager would of be enough. I mean why did they feel the need to fork the solitaire game when the problem was the desktop? but hopefully we will see the whole environment move on to gtk3 soon and then much of the redundancies between the Mate Gnome and Cinnamon projects could be merged and leave use with several desktop options but one set of utilities and application

Re:Pointless fork

[Nerdfest]

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.

Example of truly owning software

[duckgod]

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.