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MATE Desktop Environment

mate-desktop.org

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Re: MATE Desktop Environment

#4
hmmh without trying to talk negatively about it, why is this on front page? am I missing something here?

What happened: people who were dissatisfied with gnome 3.x forked gnome 2 (a long time ago), created the Mate Desktop Environment, and that's pretty much it.

somewhat ancient history and the site has nothing of particular interest to offer... (no revolutionary milestone or anything of that sort)

Re: MATE Desktop Environment

#5
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.

Re: MATE Desktop Environment

#6
post #4

hmmh without trying to talk negatively about it, why is this on front page? am I missing something here? What happened: people who were dissatisfied with gnome 3.x forked gnome 2 (a long time ago), created the Mate Desktop Environment, and that's pretty much it. somewhat ancient history and the site has nothing of particular interest to offer... (no revolutionary milestone or anything of that sort)

According to the linked page, a new version was released a week ago.

Re: MATE Desktop Environment

#7
post #4

hmmh without trying to talk negatively about it, why is this on front page? am I missing something here? What happened: people who were dissatisfied with gnome 3.x forked gnome 2 (a long time ago), created the Mate Desktop Environment, and that's pretty much it. somewhat ancient history and the site has nothing of particular interest to offer... (no revolutionary milestone or anything of that sort)

According to the linked page, a new version was released a week ago.

mhmh yeah I saw that, was unsure if that is the reason it gets upvoted... one should link to this though http://www.mate-desktop.org/blog/2016-04-08-mate-1-14-releas... but ok...

Re: MATE Desktop Environment

#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?

Re: MATE Desktop Environment

#9

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?

lacking hardware support for new graphic cards and some weird wireless cards

printing is incredibly broken and sometimes cumbersome

some games and applications (photoshop, et cetera) people care for don't run or only with some work involved

it does not come pre-installed with computers people buy

not sure about power efficiency (power drain optimizations for notebooks and the like), but last I checked it's less efficient there

not necessarily a gui for everything

mere fact that there is so much choice (distributions, desktop environments, et cetera) that it is confusing

no central customer support

xorg is a mess, wayland afaik with some bad design decisions already

those were always the reasons weren't they?

your comment seems to imply it's not usable on the desktop, that's not the case, but for above reasons it has never gone mainstream (and will not in the near future) for the desktop.

but I am really an unsympathetic person to the whole linux-on-desktop mission. for me it's a server os or for specific use cases (ps4 based on freebsd, android, et cetera), that's where it shines, it's nice it works on the desktop, and I always use bsd/linux for my machines, but some think it apparently has to rival/beat windows/macos, don't agree with that. (in many ways it's particularly nice for developers/geeks because it's a server os working on the desktop, not another windows/macos - tell that to the systemd folks...)

Re: MATE Desktop Environment

#10

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?

I don't know what other people's issues are with it, but generally the experience isn't entirely smooth, and for some things there aren't fallback methods when problems arise things just go to shit.

My recent negative experience with graphics drivers. I had a Nvidia gpu set with a proprietary driver, switched to an AMD gpu, and then x server fails to start. I didn't know how to fix this on the command line. I had to pop the Nvidia gpu back in, switch to the open driver. After switching back to the AMD gpu there are serious graphical issues that make it impossible to accomplish anything; this same AMD gpu used to work just fine when side-by-side with the Nvidia card, only recently had this issue after the Nvidia card was removed. This experience is very grating. Windows handles gpu swapping with multiple driver installs very well, I didn't have any negative experiences with it on my desktop. I haven't touched Linux for weeks because I dread having to spend time fixing this when I can easily boot Windows and work without issue.

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