Mate 1.22 released | Hacker News Reader

Mate 1.22 released

mate-desktop.org

61 pointsbased218 comments

Mate is such a clean and usable DE - makes me really wonder what happened with GNOME 3

What killed me more is how Unity was basically just a rrally bad clone of Gnome 3 and I find it so unecessary. Gnome 3 is extendable in ways Unity never achieved. I wish they had spent their efforts just making Gnome 3 extendable for future releases not just fork it immediately.

I dont mind Unity but I can get a similar enough experience just using Gnome 3.

I do have to agree though Gnome 3 is a whole other DE than Gnome 2. You either have to use XFCE or Mate to get back that old feel from Mate.

At least with KDE4 it was just unstable but it was still a familiar enough DE. I do miss the first time use wizard KDE used to have though where it asked what OS you were most accustomed to and adjusted shortcuts and file manager behaviors to those experiences.

What's funny is how nostalgia for Unity has surged after Ubuntu 18.04 was shipped with GNOME. I've found the UX of 18.04 on GNOME to be far superior compared to Unity in 16.04.

You can call it nostalgia, but maybe Unity users that were happy with it were less vocal than Unity haters.

Unity is my favorite DE and I haven't found a good replacement yet.

I didn't hate it, I am indifferent about it. I am not seeing a huge difference in my use of Unity vs Gnome. I use Unity (14.04) at work and Gnome (Pop_OS!) at home.

Gnome 3 isn't for people with low end and legacy hardware, or for those with neurological conditions that inhibit recollection of words.

If you don't have a relatively new and powerful machine and cannot easily recall the names of the Gnome software suite, well, it's not going to work well for you.

I'm running Gnome 3 on a 6-year-old dual-core laptop without any issues, I wouldn't call that recent or powerful. But running it on a Pentium 4 probably isn't the best idea.

About the naming: could you clarify this? The default software launcher allows you to search by keywords as well, so "mail", "email", "calendar" will all launch Evolution. Likewise, "camera", "webcam", or "photo" will all show Cheese. The same applies to all other apps. Granted, the names are a bit bad considering their purpose, but the icons make it quite clear to me.

That's a powerful machine. It won't run well on most common SBCs, for instance, let alone the hundreds of millions of older machines the world over that chug along with older versions of Windows.

Searching by noun is a problem for numerous neurological impairments. Some people have trouble spelling, typing and recollection, and the absence of desktop icons limits their ability to use spatial awareness and movement to operate the desktop environment.

After giving a fair chance to Gnome 3 and Unity I decided to seek refuge in XFCE 4. I was a happy user of Gnome 2, but I'm not sure how things are today.

How does it compare to XFCE?

I think GNOME 3 is just a bit vocal in their design philosophy. The workflow is different from other DEs so it can feel either minimalist or restrictive, depending on how you choose to look at it.

Gnome3 has a serious performance issue.

Honestly, what drove me away from it was the fact that the whole DE seems to run on a single thread, meaning that any extension or animation going on the top panel, or anything else on the interface for that matter, creates microstutters in the compositor.

I have a relatively beefy machine (AMD FX 8 cores @4.4GHz, R9 290x GPU), if I have an application running at 60fps (something really simple like glxgears) and I click on any panel menu (like the calendar), the application stutters.

I'm now using Budgie, haven't looked back since I've tried it.

How long will GTK2 be supported? Is it still getting security updates?

Not sure, but it looks like Mate was ported from gtk2 to gtk3.

https://wiki.mate-desktop.org/status:gtk3

MATE supports GTK 3 only as of 1.18, i.e. two stable release ago.

As far as I understand, it is using GTK+3 but following the GNOME 2.0 Human Interface Guide.

AFAIK GTK-2 stopped being officially supported as soon as GTK was released. Though there does still seem to be activity in the git repo https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gtk/tree/gtk-2-24

In any case MATE migrated to GTK-3 some time ago, as of MATE 1.18 https://mate-desktop.org/blog/2017-03-13-mate-1-18-released/

Oh, and GTK-4 is coming soon...

Eom was ported to Python 3, eh?

Anyone have pointers on how to get started developing on/for mate? Found some books on gnome 2 from the turn of the century.

Just came here to say, check out KDE Plasma it is amazing (:

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