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, Funny)
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.
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Don't confuse GNOME3 with GNOME Shell..
Meaningless Semantics (Score:3, Insightful)
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I'm under the impression Ubuntu Unity is based on gnome3, too. Compare the running processes, there is not much difference.
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Are but would that comment make a fishwife blush?
(A fishwife is the wife of a fisherman. Cast your mind back a hundred years or so: the fishing fleet arrives back at 2 am, there is no radio, the motive power was sail, it is cold windy & raining, there are no freezers, no electricity, the menfolk simply want to safe the boats and flake to bed, their women folk have to climb out of bed and gut the fish ready for the market with very sharp knives. Now what kind of language are these 'gentle ladies' like
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You're right here -- such hard work was the case for most of the population, too. However, the nobles or big fat priests never had to interact with fishwives. Whom they had a chance to talk to? Palace guards, who were ordered to use the high language. Palace servants, ditto. No one on the road -- carriages had curtains for a reason. But, what was the primary means of long-range transport those days? Ships. And aboard a ship, one-percenters had no real way to avoid meeting a certain class of uncultur
Re:Pointless fork (Score:4, Informative)
You used the word "deploy", which makes it seem like you're concerned with having many systems with identical desktop configurations. In that case, just install the one you prefer to manage. There are many to choose from, including mate ('sudo apt-get install mate').
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I'm still irritated that Debian didn't put Mate in the wheezy repos. Right now a squeeze->wheezy update will go from Gnome 2 to Gnome 3 when the ability for it to go Gnome2->Mate with Gnome3 as a separate option could have been right there.
(fwiw, I use Gnome 3 on my HTPC and Gnome2/Mate on my development machine; they both fill different niches).
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I'm still irritated that Debian didn't put Mate in the wheezy repos.
Yeah man I agree. When I Google searched the mailing lists, the consensus from the Debian guys was that MATE was a pointless fork.
Debian still builds binaries for the 68000 processor architecture, so they should know from pointless!
Since MATE is being packaged up for Ubuntu and other Debian-ish distros, it should be doable to put those packages into Debian. I really don't know why that would be a problem at all. I thought Debian was prou
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Mate 1.6 is probably going to be great one day
Yeah I see what you are doing there. It doesn't work, because MATE is already great.
Sun Microsystems paid for usability experts to evaluate GNOME, and the results of that work were folded into GNOME 2.x, with the result that it is really usable. Plus there were man-decades of work refining and polishing the UI. It wasn't perfect (nothing is) but it was very solidly usable.
GNOME Shell threw all that in the bin. No usability studies; e.g. the minimize button w
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People like me, singleton users, don't really care about things that make your professional life a tad more complicated. That's what you're paid for. Sorry.
At heart, you are reflecting the same corporate make-things-easy notions that underpin the adoption of Windows.
The more alternatives in Linux, the better. Fork away, people!
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.
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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.
Re:Pointless fork (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Well, FWIW, I still prefer Gnome2 to KDE4, but, to be fair, I also preferred KDE3 to Gnome2.
Currently I'm using KDE4, but if MATE has gotten past it's teething problems (it was very slow the last time I installed it, but that's nearly a year ago now), I may switch to it. That would mean, however, downloading a live CD to test, so I may give it some more time.
OTOH, my suspicion is that ElectricSheep still won't work on MATE, and that is one of my wife's requriements for my computer.
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... the basic desktop configurations that GNOME2 does like multi-head-separate-screen.
Ca you please provide a link that describes this feature ?
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Which feature? Multiple discrete screens? This is really just the good-old multiple head mode of X11 without any "screen merging/joining" features such as Xinerama or GPU merging like Nvidia twinview.
You know you have this multiple screen operating mode if you have more than one screen and your first screen is :0.0 and your second one is :0.1 and your third one is :0.2, etc. You likely also cannot drag windows from one screen to the other. But what you can do is have multiple workspaces on each screen t
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not at all, just try tmux :-)
THANK GOD FOR MATE! (and the developers...) (Score:1)
'nuff said
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Amen
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You said it, brothers.
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...that's fine so long as I am running a tablet.
Unfortunately, I haven't quite yet bought into all of this "death of the PC" rhetoric and I still need something that's useful on the kit that I still have.
Of course you will get resistance when you try to force an inappropriate interface on someone. A lot of people aren't actually sheep. This is especially true of Unix users.
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Exactly.
And 'death of the PC' -- wouldn't that in its wake ... smartphone,
automatiaslly bring about the death of
tablet, embedded, you name it??
After all ... let me rephrase that -- does anybody know .... tablet!!??
of anyone doing coding, software development, app-
writing, whatever you want to call it, doing coding on
a
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FTFY.
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.
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Not only that, but the word from on high seemed to be "suck it". I wonder if any concessions to usability would have been made at all if the forks hadn't happened.
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thanks auto correct evidently tried to help me and i did not notice
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For what it's worth, I do like the Program Manager interface. I like that it's absolutely simple, and does only a single thing at a time. 99% of the time, that's a bad thing, but once in a while it's perfect, such as for an interface for one-off appliances. When the machine boots, Program Manager only offers icons for the applications necessary for the appliance. While other applications may still exist on the system, they can be kept hidden from the more dangerous users.
No, you can't use the bookkeeping sy
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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.
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Being better than OSX and Win8 is hardly much to brag about. Personally, I agree that it's pointless - because Gnome went off the rails at version 2, and if I was going to fork it I would go back to a 1.x series. But so what? Enough people found this useful to do it. So it's not pointless for them, and they have no obligation to care what you or I think of it.
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Lets Look at Data (Score:1)
XP: 39%
OS X: 7%
Linux: 1%
Gnome: Some fraction of 1%.
So I'd say that XP is very much current and not in the past (as I type this on an XP machine).
And yes, Win XP makes me more productive than that stupid *#S dock on OS X. A green plus button the size of pixel that does something different every time I click it and alt/cmd - tab that doesn't cycle through your windows. Now GET OFF MY LAWN!
Opportunity Cost (Score:1)
Pedantic Putz (Score:1)
As a mate desktop user (Score:2, Interesting)
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
Re:As a mate desktop user (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Bingo.
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.
Example of truly owning software (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Has Trinity become usable? The last time I tried to test it it required removing multiple packages, and then after I bit the bullet and did that, it didn't add itself to the login choices. So I've been reluctant to try it again.
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. :-)
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It's "Planned Obsolescence," actually, and isn't highlighted by the examples you cite, as those are caused by shifts in industry (the shift away from PowerPC was now 7 years ago.)
A better example is how handset makers design a device and support it poorly once it is sold (leaving security holes open, not porting versions of Android that the hardware is more than capable of running) with the goal of rendering it obsolete and pushing users to buy the next device.
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Micro who?
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Micro-DVI to DVI adaptor, Part Number: MB204G. http://www.amazon.com/Apple-MB204G-Micro-DVI-Video-Adapter/dp/B0012RAI84 [amazon.com]
It was only available on first gen MacBook Air.
Here, this page might help you in the future and you can see the insanity of having X standards.
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_connectors [wikipedia.org]
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Hmm...
I was trying to point out, possibly too subtly, that Microsoft is now essentially irrelevant!
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Quickly becoming that way, but sadly not yet. :-/
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Yes, when a large animal is dying, you can still be mortally wounded by their death spasms.
I'm more worried by Apple, but Apple has already lost the server wars, and seems to be starting to lose in the smart phone & tablet space. I think we are starting to see manufacturers & OEMs (those in the consumer electronics and phone segments) that are beholden to neither Apple nor Microsoft, start moving up the food chain - the current battleground is tablets, next is laptops...
Note all eBooks are based o
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Another Windows Metro/Modern fan I see. Big news for you! Windows Blue will allow you to choose your tile sizes!