
Mate Desktop 1.24 - ashitlerferad
https://mate-desktop.org/blog/2020-02-10-mate-1-24-released/
======
bombela
I use mate desktop with i3 for the windows management. This means everything
just works. Volume keys, brightness, usb storage auto-mounting, complex audio
configuration, printers configuration, lock screen, battery management, mouse
settings, external displays settings, screenshots and so on and so forth. I
get the best of both world. Without Mate, I would have to hack everything
together and spend days configuring everything by hand.

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
    

Welcome to the year of Desktop on Linux.

~~~
Tenoke
I've tried tiling WMs a few times, maybe 4 years ago last and liked them
(inclduing i3) but at least at the time there were too many problems.

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?

~~~
411111111111111
Homestly, nothing changed. It's just (imo) hard to figure out yourself if
nobody tells you that it's possible.

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?

~~~
bombela
I find the i3 documentation excellent.

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!

------
dyingkneepad
Gnome 2 was a very shiny and polished desktop environment. Its death (in favor
of Gnome 3) meant a lot of people who contributed to it (e.g., me) got
fragmented into Mate, Cinnamon, Xfce and others. I wonder what would have
happened if Gnome was still a usable thing and this massive migration out of
it was not necessary. Would we have fought over some other problem and forked
regardless? Would we all have worked together to make it even more awersome?

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 :).

~~~
dleslie
It didn't die; somehow it changed direction hard enough to lose significant
developer capacity.

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?

~~~
BearOso
I still hold that they should’ve renamed GNOME 3 something other than GNOME
and let each develop as their own things. I feel like that method would’ve
hemorrhaged fewer developers. Clearly there was some sort of closed meeting at
Redhat with the few people that inherited leadership of GNOME deciding on the
complete overhaul; it wasn’t a democratic process.

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.

~~~
dleslie
It cannot run on most ARM SBCs; I can't run it with any reasonable consistent
responsiveness on any but my newest PC. Gnome 3 is _still_ a pig; and utterly
useless to most of the world which still operates on half decade or decade old
PCs.

It's a prime example of privileged western developers overlooking the needs of
their users.

~~~
anthk
I live in a Western country and Gnome3 is still a pig on low end 4GB RAM based
machines. Budgie is much faster.

------
dleslie
Mate is easily the best Linux DE available; I love that they're focusing on
fixing bugs and incremental improvements to keep pace with hardware
improvements, rather than chasing unneeded software features.

------
platypii
Really grateful that Mate exists. To this day, gnome3 has not reached parity
with gnome2 on flexibility of configuration. I don't even make a lot of
customizations to my desktop, but having the option when I need it is really
key.

~~~
pizza234
GNOME doesn't reach parity on configurability because... it's by design.

There is an extensive post on the subject:
[https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-
rotti...](https://igurublog.wordpress.com/2012/11/05/gnome-et-al-rotting-in-
threes). 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

~~~
Lammy
It doesn't happen very often any more, but when people always used to ask why
I didn't like GNOME 3 I'd just point them to the devs' own words on the
mailing list: [https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-shell-
list/2011-June/m...](https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gnome-shell-
list/2011-June/msg00110.html)

~~~
pizza234
From that thread:

> 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

~~~
axaxs
Maybe if Gnome's default theme didn't make window title bars half the size of
the screen, people wouldn't be so eager to theme. Seriously, I have a huge, hi
res monitor and the default theme makes it feel like some child or elderly
specific thing. Nobody uses Gnome on a tablet, give it up!

------
Nux
Super grateful for this project, I use it every day on all my computers.

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.

~~~
aelo
I'm honestly really happy with GnomeShell once I install the extensions "dash
to dock" and "workspace matrix".

~~~
dyingkneepad
Until you apt-get update and they break :)

------
jl6
I switched to XFCE away from Gnome 3 after becoming frustrated with Nautilus’s
lack of type-ahead-find. I am perfectly happy with XFCE now. I’d be interested
to hear from users with experience of both XFCE and MATE how they compare, as
they seem to have similar design goals.

~~~
nolok
As a fellow xfce user, it's hard to get convinced by other alternatives
because why they may have more polished on some things, the things they do
worse will be really worse. You only need to fight one or two time with your
wifi or Taskbar after an update to realize you just don't want to waste your
time doing that.

With that said, for the part that work well Mate definitely feels like a
cleaner nicer xfce.

------
mongol
How does Mate compare to XFCE? Not as "which is better" but as "what are the
main differences"?

~~~
kop316
XFCE is designed from the get go to be very light weight. On my laptop I
average ~300 MB Ram usage idling with 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.

------
HerrMonnezza
I really really wish Ubuntu had decided to ship MATE as their default desktop
at the time of the GNOME 2 to 3 transition, instead of trying to create their
own DE, abandon it 4 years later, and then reverting on GNOME3 ...

~~~
garaetjjte
There was some speculation that GNOME3 redesign was done because of Microsoft
patent threats
[https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/03/thank_microsoft_for...](https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/06/03/thank_microsoft_for_linux_desktop_fail/)

------
imharvey
This gave me flashbacks to Gnome 2 and how much I loved it.

~~~
p1necone
After Gnome 3 and the abomination of wasted screen real estate that was Unity
released I switched to using XFCE on Linux environments and haven't really
found anything better since. It's so snappy even on crappy hardware and is
customizable enough.

~~~
thepangolino
I actually liked unity. Putting the task bar on the side was a great idea at
an age when screen started getting flatter and flatter.

The HUD(?) was a great concept allowing easy Dutch within an apps menus.

~~~
AnIdiotOnTheNet
> Putting the task bar on the side was a great idea at an age when screen
> started getting flatter and flatter.

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.

~~~
Sharlin
Indeed even Windows 95 let you do that.

------
kop316
It's funny to think about, I first used Gnome 2 in 2006 and I remember having
to install XFCE on my laptop. My laptop only had 256 MB of RAM, so GNOME at
the time was too resource intensive. My Desktop had 2 GB of ram (so it
couldn't really run Vista when that came out), but it could run Gnome + Compiz
extremely well.

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.

~~~
anthk
Ditto. I uses Gnome2 under an Athlon an 256MB of RAM too, but Fedora's Gnome 2
was unusable, Debian was far faster.

Nowadays is either Fluxbox+rox+udiskie on Slackware/+hotplug-diskmount under
OpenBSD.

------
superkuh
They're dropping python2 support for caja (nautilus) plugins so watch out if
you have any python based caja (nautilus) scripts. Not that that's
unreasonable. Just beware.

------
nbrempel
Is Wayland support a big deal? Or do most desktop environment support both
Wayland and X11 in some way? I'm not familiar with how it works.

~~~
axaxs
Wayland is "the future", but I don't bother with it. It has too many warts and
lack of support. Screen sharing support is a hack that kinda works, except for
Electron apps. X 'just works'.

------
sdfin
I like XFCE and MATE but I decided to use Gnome 3 only because with XFCE and
MATE I had some problems connecting a TV with HDMI to the computer. With some
tweaking it works, but with Gnome 3 it works out of the box, as it does in
Windows.

~~~
uxp100
Yeah, I was just thinking of switching away from Mate on my laptop yesterday
because of the external monitor experience. It was struggle to get it working,
and once it does it is nowhere near seamless.

------
oxplot
I'm still rocking MATE+Compiz on Arch and it's a pleasure to work with (as
much as it was back in 2008). Really appreciate the work of all the devs who
keep maintaining both of these to date.

------
johnmarcus
I have been using gnome 3 on zorin and popos for a few months without issue.
What am I missing that everyone here seems to think it's disfunctional?

------
princevegeta89
Used MATE a couple of times. I'd say it is the most beautiful and a generally
well done lightweight DE. Takes me back to early Ubuntu days

------
anthk
Gorilla and Motif themes :D.

Now we need these old icons adapted to the new XDG standards and I'm done.

------
genpfault
buster-backports when? :)

