Mate Desktop 1.24
mate-desktop.org
mate-desktop.org
If you want to replicate this setup: Start with Ubuntu Mate. Install i3 via apt. Select i3 on the login screen. In your i3 configuration add the following:
exec --no-startup-id exec mate-settings-daemon
exec --no-startup-id exec mate-screensaver
exec --no-startup-id exec mate-power-manager
exec --no-startup-id exec nm-applet
If everything works now, Id be willing to try i3 when I install ubuntu 20.04.
Is it now easy to set up a launcher/start bar with a nice battery/volume/wifi etc. indicator? That work both when I click on them and via keys and with the icons visibly changing based on the current state?
Do all Windows open normally? Do they all fullscreen normally? Which don't?
Do you get any crashes?
Are there any WM-specific settings/fixes you have to tweak more often than once every 6 months?
> Is it now easy to set up a launcher/start bar with a nice battery/volume/wifi etc. indicator?
I've been using bumblebee-status for that and it works like a charm. It's very modular too: https://github.com/tobi-wan-kenobi/bumblebee-status
here are a couple of dotfiles:
.config/i3/config: https://pastebin.com/n9rAWNhf
.config/i3/scripts/i3exit https://pastebin.com/CxETEW9H
I highly recommend to use i3-save-tree to dump the json into a file (e.g. workspace_[number].json) to get your terminals (or any other applications) set up when logging in exactly the way you want.
sometimes the json needs editing (here is what it would look like in my setup):
.config/i3/workspace-1.json https://pastebin.com/7VGbQShy
The other way around is also possible btw (starting gnome/mate/xfce and starting i3 right at login. I personally preferred the parents way as well though (using xfce though)
You won't be using Wayland with i3 however, and weren't they going to prefer that with Ubuntu 20 and onwards?
On Ubuntu Mate, when you install i3, the login manager let you select it. There is nothing special to do.
i3 doesn't work on wayland. I have heard sway is a great alternative. I will have to try it one day!
For starting application I use a launcher called rofi via a shortcut. For status indicators and so on, I have configured the i3 status bar (i3bar) to give me battery status, cpu usage, different timezones of interest etc. The only fancy thing I did, was to use cute unicode glyph to indicate charging status ().
i3bar has a "system tray" section. Where nm-applet will dock its wifi indicator/control icon. And other chat and conference applications will dock theirs little icons.
I have no problem with any windows. You can customize everything either statically in the config or on the fly. For example, my chats applications are always moved to the scratch space area when running. I can summon them with a shortcut at any time from any desktop. I also have a shortcut to mark any floating window as sticky across any virtual desktop. This is useful for video conferencing, to keep the video visible at all time. Etc.
Windows seem to work as expected. Dialogs/pop ups show up as floating windows, but everything else worked well as a tiled window. Fullscreen worked fine. I haven't used a wide variety of apps. Mostly a few browsers and terminals, but I was doing some Qt dev in it, so I was playing a bit with windowing.
> Is it now easy to set up a launcher/start bar...That work both when I click on them and via keys...
From what I've seen of i3, all of the status bars are text printed from a separate program that gets executed periodically. This makes it very flexible and with things like font-awesome you can have emoji and icons, but afaik you can't click or have pop ups. Other tiling WMs, like AwesomeWM, will do this.
If windows don’t behave, I put them in floating mode with Super-f or Super-shift-f to toggle. As you say, full screen when they shouldn’t be, or vice versa. In practice, the only app I have issues with is Zoom.
The i3bar implementation, includes battery charge, network info, etc. a click takes you to gnome-settings, where you can make changes. One of the few changes I make to i3.conf is to move the bar to the top. Personal preference.
If you tried it and liked tiling before, regolith is worth a shot. It’s pretty well done.
Here is a blog post I wrote on how to do it: https://www.mattgreer.org/articles/mate-and-i3/
I also created a MATE panel applet so you don't need to have an i3bar.
Maybe it works if you remove and replace a bunch of settings and applets and whatever? I don't know but given that the second thing I did was already broken I didn't invest more time.
Ubuntu 18.04. Would not recommend to those thinking it will just work as expected.
When you say super key, do you mean the windows key? And hitting it opens up the main MATE menu? For me, it opens up as expected: https://i.imgur.com/dZzQt1t.png and choosing an item from it does the expected thing.
For the i3 mod key I use alt. Is it possible you have both MATE and i3 set to the same super/mod key?
Literally didn't add anything or make it remotely MATE-like. I did not investigate further. Ubuntu 18.04. Would not reccomend if anyone else thinks it works out of the box after reading this comment.
It also saddens me that Red Hat insists on dumping its money in Gnome 3. I would love if they were putting their resources in improving something I actually use :).
I liken it to the total failure of the Flickr rewrite. Flickr could have been Facebook!
So... How did that happen? Who was responsible for setting Gnome dev back by half a decade?
GNOME 3 is performing well enough now that I have moved over to it. At its introduction, though, it forced compositing, and drivers were not ready. That coupled with the massive UI changes gave users good reasons to complain.
It's a prime example of privileged western developers overlooking the needs of their users.
The initial release was pretty bad, but it's gotten much better over the years.
In my world, extensions are required (at the very least, dash-to-dock). But extensions are a second class citizen and often stop working after an apt-get update.
And Gnome forces my machine into heavy swapping. Cinnamon (which is almost the same thing, but usable) doesn't cause swapping.
In any case, in my experience extensions aren't as brittle as you're implying, they generally only stop working after a major gnome version update (e.g. 3.32 > 3.34) which you wouldn't get through an apt-get update.
I haven't had any swapping issues at all, but I suppose this could be hardware dependent (e.g. nvidia drivers are known to cause serious memory leaks with mutter)
There is an extensive post on the subject: https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotti.... It's tragicomic to read ("And I have no idea what XFCE is or does sorry.")
I'd say that the GNOME devs have Jobs' ego and intention, but none of his talent(s). But at least they have branding™! /s
> Can we declare that GNOME Shell doesn't have themes, and prevent people from posting screenshots of GNOME Shell with a modified theme or with a modified top panel?
o_O
> Transmission has an option in the Desktop tab of the preferences to “Show Transmission icon in the notification area”. This should probably be removed.
I grew out of theming and tweaking the look of a desktop before I got to high school. These days the only tweaking I do on any OS is keyboard shortcuts. The baseline has gotten good enough to just not care, and my guess is that that's most users' position regardless of OS.
Maybe it's the age talking, but to me it feels like Gnome2/MATE is the peak of the desktop paradigm. Also Windows XP/7, in terms of UI/X.
People took the desktop for what it was and tried to make the most of it.
Nowadays most DEs, including Windows feel like they are made for a phone or a tablet.
With that said, for the part that work well Mate definitely feels like a cleaner nicer xfce.
MATE is the spiritual successor to Gnome 2, which isn't as light weight (but they haven't tried to add things to make it bloated, and gnome 2 was never too resource intensive). It is taking ~700 MB idling on that same laptop.
The HUD(?) was a great concept allowing easy Dutch within an apps menus.
That's hardly innovation though since most DEs over the past 2+ decades that I can think of would let you move the taskbar (if they had one) anyway.
The problem with Unity was that it was buggy as hell, and the launcher was really badly styled. Huge gaps between icons, the search filter was unusable, etc.
I don't have that laptop anymore, but I now have a Thinkpad X200, which has 8 GB of RAM. So now Gnome 2 is "lightweight" since it can consume under 1 GB idling, and it is sitting at 1.7 GB with normal usage. I'm glad to see that some software hasn't been bloated up simply because the processing power exists.
Nowadays is either Fluxbox+rox+udiskie on Slackware/+hotplug-diskmount under OpenBSD.
Now we need these old icons adapted to the new XDG standards and I'm done.