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Comment by david-given | Hacker News Reader

My father's been a happy Ubuntu user for years (and a fairly resentful one for a few more years --- he still misses the old GNOME user interface and loathes Unity). He mainly uses it for Gimp and LibreOffice.

When he had to switch from OpenOffice to LibreOffice he was pretty close to packing it all in and using something else; his argument was: why should he trust a package produced by an organisation that can't keep their own house in order?

That is, from the outside the schism between OpenOffice and LibreOffice is basically invisible; they're both considered to be the same thing, because they produce the same software. It's seen as an internal conflict, and it's a big reputational problem.

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> and a fairly resentful one for a few more years --- he still misses the old GNOME user interface and loathes Unity

Why doesn't he use Mate? Ubuntu Mate is readily available on the Ubuntu website. Is he aware that it's a continuation of the old Gnome (Gnome 2)? And well-maintained to boot.

I've tried him on it a few times (I maintain his machine for him). It's always been too buggy, by which I mean, obvious visible UI bugs immediately after installation. Unity may be horrible, but it has much more robust QA testing.

Entertainingly, when I let him play with a bunch of different Linux desktop environments, the one he liked best was actually Haiku, which I threw in as a joke.

> It's always been too buggy, by which I mean, obvious visible UI bugs immediately after installation.

Really? I've installed Mate on ~10 computers, and have never run into UI bugs. I run Mate, my two kids run it on their computer, and I'm sometimes on that one helping them with school related stuff. Never run into UI bugs. I don't doubt that there are such bugs, but in my experience they're pretty rare (unless the project has taken a recent nosedive, always possible in open source).

I've run into some UI bugs using Mint Cinnamon, are you sure you were using Mate and not Cinnamon?

Do you remember what the bugs were? If it's something you can remember, I'll see if I can fix them so that future users don't run into them.

Not even slightly, sorry. It was a year or so ago.

I'll certainly give Mate another try the next time I upgrade him.

Another potential option is to throw Compiz in the mix after you have Mate up and running. Though that may make things more buggy than less, at least you can justify it with eye candy. :)

I tried MATE recently, I wanted to like it too but found it to be slower than Xfce.

> too but found it to be slower than Xfce.

Yes, I wouldn't be surprised if Mate is slower than Xfce, since it's traditionally considered more featureful. Besides, even using a cheap $200 netbook, desktop environment speed is just not an issue for me as long as I use linux + any reasonably fast DE.

Cinnamon might be another worthwhile thing to try.

MATE is really a better GNOME2, some ppl don't want to believe it. There is somehow a parallel to OpenOffice and LibreOffice. Many non techy ppl don't know what forking is (for them it sounds as fornication). It adds to the confusion and we end up with a lot of users hesitating to try a better software.

I'm not sure MATE can be treated as "Gnome2 under a different name" at this point. While it started as a fork, they're doing some pretty massive refactoring, like gradually moving to Gtk3.

Has he tried Ubuntu MATE to get back the "old GNOME" style interface?

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