MATE Desktop Environment
mate-desktop.org
mate-desktop.org
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)
The submitter probably forgot that HN is for bleeding edge JS frameworks only.
Neat! And here I've been pronouncing it like the English word "mate".
My late father had oesophageal cancer from drinking up to a dozen cups of tea a day, with reflux.
GNOME 3 got it right for me, one button/hand motion for everything, since starting it, I only moved between it and qtile because I like automatic tiling from time to time.
Is there something else it's doing?
Would recommend for desktop.
I'm thinking of trying Ubuntu mate in a new build though, there's a new version out that's supposedly very usable (previous versions have been strongly beta apparently). Clearly, distros rise and fall.
What are the problems with Linux on the desktop?
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...)
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.
I do miss having a proper package manager. Homebrew is just okay.
Another example: any font rendering in a web browser. Generally terrible.
https://wiki.debian.org/Fonts#Subpixel-hinting_and_Font-smoo...
Paste it into ~/.config/fontconfig/fonts.conf
I use the Croscore set of fonts, the ones based on the Arial/Times/Courier that Google uses on the Chromebook and for me, it looks even better than on Windows or OSX.
This is my config: https://github.com/edgard/dotfiles/blob/master/config/fontco...
"X" is pretty great nowadays, you just need to enable some obscure option.
And that's the problem of linux. It's like that for everything.
I'd you are building your own desktop from building blocks in Arch or similar then configuring obscure options is what you chose to do.
I recently bought a macbook after being a gnome 3 user for a few years. I had heard the anecodotes: many linux users, even some high profile ones like Miguel deGuza, had switched to mac, claiming that it was unix but with a better user experience, without the mess...cleaner, put together, smoother, etc, etc.
What a lie. Yes, some things are as smooth as they were on gnome 3, but the differences are to be very honest, not that significant. Gnome 3's window management, short cuts, everything was orders of magnitude better than mac os x. An interesting comparison, I've been using mac os x for 8 months, and it still feels like a kludge, I've adapted to it, rather than embracing it. For Gnome 3, I adapted to it within 2 months, and after that, I could use nothing else because of how fluid it is. Finally, workspaces on gnome 3 make me feel organized. On this macbook? My windows feels like a constant mess, and I still haven't figured it out. Again, it's not familiarity! Gnome 3 was weird at first but I fell in love after the initial hurdle. For this thing, if this is an initial hurdle, I still haven't found the valley after almost a year!
Oh, and the "it's unix", what a lie! I don't care if it's "unix(tm)", either I am so steeped in gnu-isms that I can't live without them, or the commandline on mac is so inferior it's not even funny. So yes, those "linux users" will tell you it's still unix, they won't tell you can't run gdb without signing it[0], they won't tell you that half of the super easy commands you find online will not be available because either the available versions are so old or they are bsd stuff. I was once open minded to using bsd but after having to suffer on apple garbage for a year I think I'll avoid BSD for the most part. Moreover, brew sucks, so bad. "Package management" (ie., dealing with conflicts between brew and the defaults that you'll sometimes have to fix manually) is just like the gui, pretty on the surface, but tending toward mess when you need control.
It was such a falsehood, to the point I either feel whoever bewitched me into thinking mac would be a "prettier" linux were either not the type of people I should have been listening to either way, or they were deliberately shills or something. Of course the latter is ridiculous, so I'll go with the well known maxim here[1] and pick the former.
Mac does one thing well, typefaces, although that's probably just the retina screen.
[0] http://andresabino.com/2015/04/14/codesign-gdb-on-mac-os-x-y... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanlon's_razor
Apparently many seem to live in GNU/Linux land without trying one of those thousand variants of UNIX. What a change in regards to the early 2000's.
In any case, no desktop savy user will care about those issues.
That isn't a cli thing, that's a gui thing. A desktop savy user may care about such things...you're assuming very little about what desktop users can take advantage of.
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.
Don't get me wrong: most of them, like KDE and Gnome, focus on some user, but that user is themselves, developers, open-source enthusiasts, etc.
All Linux desktop environments look really, really bad by default. Even Gnome 3, Kde 4 and Unity have terrible defaults, like icons I would be ashamed to draw on a high school art class (not that I would do better, I'm no designer, far from it). Also, there's no way to get a consistent looking desktop if you don't stick to the default applications. Having GTK and QT apps to look well together involves a lot of forum-reading and googling, and it's never 100% decent.
Usability only fits a very narrow category of users. Both Gnome and Unity have completely disregarded the Desktop community and shifted to either "tabletish" or "keyboard-driven" interfaces, something too many users simply don't feel at home with. KDE, while choosing to stay more on the classic "windowish" desktop, have been a complete unfocused mess of a project.
Then, for a third and last example, there's the lack of decent apps. All the commonly used apps for a Linux desktop user are usually "good enough" for what they're supposed to do, but none are really, really great. LibreOffice does the job, but it's a decade behind even MS Office. Linux ports of commercial apps are usually hideous and lacking features.
Bottomline: Linux desktop environments have been playing catch up with the commercial desktops since forever, but keep doing the same mistakes. Most distro's tried to copy the "App Store" model, for instance, but have done so terribly enough that I still find myself installing "Yumex" or "Synaptics" everytime I build a new machine.
There are, however, people going in the right direction. I've been watching projects like Deepin, Elementary OS and Solus - and I honestly think they're trying hard to do what bigger projects have been failing at. Maybe they'll stand up, maybe their ideas will be merged into the bigger boys, but it's good to know someone's actually trying.
Everything pretty much works; occasionally I have to tweak some config file or install 32 bit libraries to get a game working, but that's about it. Video drivers work. Audio works. Wireless printers are autodetected smoothlessly. I can pretty much do with Linux what I used to do with Windows ten years ago, and more. I'm happy enough that I would recommend it to my mother if she bought a new computer and didn't require any strict MS Office compliance.
I'd say MS Office is a huge weapon in Microsoft's arsenal. Even though I'm pretty happy with my occasional use of LibreOffice, I guess for people that really need exchanging MS Office documents with other people and have them look identical in both computers, Linux is problematic.
- I miss all the third-party Mac dev software. Git Tower, Kaleidoscope, Viscosity, Fantastical, OmniFocus... This is what has locked me into OS X for a decade now (starting with TextMate).
- The trackpad drivers for my MacBook Air are terrible. I couldn't get palm rejection to work. I think I wasn't happy with the Magic Trackpad either. I don't want to go back to mice...
The software issue sounds really hard to fix unless porting to Linux via OpenStep(?) becomes a thing.
I'd be quite confident in saying if there was a Windows 7/10 style UI for GNU/Linux, you'd have people more comfortable with making the switch. Ubuntu Linux has made strides in locking things down and simplifying the UI for average (non-power) users.
The first big step to making Linux the desktop platform of choice will involve simplification by a large margin, i.e., appealing to the lowest common denominator and then building up from there.
Most Linux desktops simply don't have that.