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MATE Desktop Environment

mate-desktop.org

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Re: MATE Desktop Environment

#11

Post by itsjareds »

chris_wot wrote: post #8

I'm curious now what stops people from using Linux on the desktop. There were significant issues a few years ago, but they now appear to be addressed. What are the problems with Linux on the desktop?

Desktop, I'm not sure. Being primarily a laptop user, I find myself missing the superior power management that comes with using the default OS and original drivers. I started with a Windows laptop with a short battery life, where ekeing out every little bit of extra juice was important, to a MacBook Pro that does very well at conserving battery. (Much better than stock Ubuntu/Linux Mint, at least.) The gestures in Mac OS and the HiDPI support are important to me too. I'm a pretty average laptop user, though, so I don't know that I'm the intended audience.

I do miss having a proper package manager. Homebrew is just okay.

Re: MATE Desktop Environment

#12

Post by r3bl »

cisstrd wrote: post #5
xutopia wrote: post #2

What happened to Gnome?

Gnome changed some things with Gnome 3.x (which was not recently) and some people were dissatisfied with it, so they forked Gnome 2.x, created the Mate Desktop Environment and that's it. Nothing happened to Gnome, it's alive and kicking.

If I'm not mistaken, MATE is far away from being the only fork of the 2.x version.

Re: MATE Desktop Environment

#13

Post by kough »

chris_wot wrote: post #8

I'm curious now what stops people from using Linux on the desktop. There were significant issues a few years ago, but they now appear to be addressed. What are the problems with Linux on the desktop?

Can't believe someone hasn't written this already: fonts. I've used Debian and Arch and had massive trouble a) figuring out what fonts are installed, b) how to install new fonts, c) getting them to not look like absolute shit. Example case: trying to use Adobe's "Source Code Pro" font with Debian's default terminal, at around 12-14px, on a 2560x1440 screen. I could get it to look good at 10px, and at 18px, but nowhere in between. One of the most frustrating experiences ever. To this day my font size is smaller than I'd like.

Another example: any font rendering in a web browser. Generally terrible.

Re: MATE Desktop Environment

#14

Post by nextos »

itsjareds wrote: post #11
chris_wot wrote: post #8

I'm curious now what stops people from using Linux on the desktop. There were significant issues a few years ago, but they now appear to be addressed. What are the problems with Linux on the desktop?

Desktop, I'm not sure. Being primarily a laptop user, I find myself missing the superior power management that comes with using the default OS and original drivers. I started with a Windows laptop with a short battery life, where ekeing out every little bit of extra juice was important, to a MacBook Pro that does very well at conserving battery. (Much better than stock Ubuntu/Linux Mint, at least.) The gestures in Ma…

If you cherry pick your laptop for Linux and use powertop (it now has a systemd service to implement all powersaving optimizations) its pretty easy to get very good power management.

Re: MATE Desktop Environment

#15

Post by cisstrd »

r3bl wrote: post #12
cisstrd wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gnome changed some things with Gnome 3.x (which was not recently) and some people were dissatisfied with it, so they forked Gnome 2.x, created the Mate Desktop Environment and that's it. Nothing happened to Gnome, it's alive and kicking.

If I'm not mistaken, MATE is far away from being the only fork of the 2.x version.

would not surprise me, it's by far the most widely used and well known though I guess

Re: MATE Desktop Environment

#16

Post by sdfin »

The last time I tried it, with Ubuntu Mate, I percieved it had more bugs than Xubuntu. Xubuntu comes with xfce. I find that xfce looks very similar to mate but runs more smoothly and it feels more polished. At least I don't remember seeing errors related to the UI with xfce, unlike the experience with mate.

Re: MATE Desktop Environment

#17

Post by bpicolo »

chris_wot wrote: post #8

I'm curious now what stops people from using Linux on the desktop. There were significant issues a few years ago, but they now appear to be addressed. What are the problems with Linux on the desktop?

These Linux desktops are still not nearly as clean, pretty and smooth an experience as Mac/Windows.

Re: MATE Desktop Environment

#18

Post by mayhew »

kough wrote: post #13
chris_wot wrote: post #8

I'm curious now what stops people from using Linux on the desktop. There were significant issues a few years ago, but they now appear to be addressed. What are the problems with Linux on the desktop?

Can't believe someone hasn't written this already: fonts. I've used Debian and Arch and had massive trouble a) figuring out what fonts are installed, b) how to install new fonts, c) getting them to not look like absolute shit. Example case: trying to use Adobe's "Source Code Pro" font with Debian's default terminal, at around 12-14px, on a 2560x1440 screen. I could get it to look good at 10px, and at 18px, but nowher…

You can paste the XML on the Debian Fonts wiki page to get nicer (IMO) looking fonts.

https://wiki.debian.org/Fonts#Subpixel-hinting_and_Font-smoo...

Paste it into ~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf

Re: MATE Desktop Environment

#19

Post by oxplot »

I can't use anything but MATE + Compiz and mostly because of Compiz'es fantastic functionality and customizability. I'm talking about color filters, grid plugin, and endless others that have no equivalent elsewhere.

Re: MATE Desktop Environment

#20

Post by ChuckMcM »

chris_wot wrote: post #8

I'm curious now what stops people from using Linux on the desktop. There were significant issues a few years ago, but they now appear to be addressed. What are the problems with Linux on the desktop?

Lets see.

Sound - it comes out of a random port sometimes with a sound source that dynamically appears (at a default of MAX volume in the mixer) that by the time you open the mixer app to turn it down is gone.

Multiple screens - multiple hells. So what happens when you go to sleep? Screens can swap, sometimes they change relative position, sometimes they simply become inaccessible. Multiple screens with multiple desktops? Now you're really playing with fire.

Fonts - mentioned elsewhere. You can go back and manually recompile FreeType to use the patented cleartype code (which I do, every damn time) and that code is long since clear to use.

Drivers - oh wait there is a blue tooth chip on your motherboard? Now all of a sudden the bluetooth daemon wants to mate with all your devices, whether are not you like it.

Networking? Passable if you want to use DHCP but what happens when one of your wired ports wants to be fixed address? It must be your primary port of course and gee it is configured but you can't NFS mount over it, oops, guess you didn't really want to automatically mount your NAS storage.

I can believe I'm over selling it but Kubuntu became unusable on my NUC when Plasma 5 came out, Xubuntu works ok but the screen switching is maddening. I went into the motherboard BIOS and had it disable the bluetooth in order to keep stuff from trying to bring it online and to mate with things. If I boot Windows 10 on this box (as challenged as that is) it is a better experience.

I'm really looking forward to Ubuntu on windows 10 kernel, that might have a shot at doing what I want.

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