
Ubuntu Mate - jtnl
http://ubuntu-mate.org/
======
sampo
Personally, I think Xubuntu desktop is better that Gnome2-based Ubuntu ever
was.

It's just that the default settings – only one panel (at the top), ugly blue
theme & background image – are not very appealing and feel dated.

But after adding a second panel, reorganizing panel contents, changing icons &
windows themes and background image, Xubuntu desktop is very nice.

~~~
rquirk
Focus follows mouse is buggy in 14.04 Xubuntu. There's no fast user switch
(you can lock the screen and switch as a good-enough workaround). Suspend and
restart causes the screen to not restore on occasions. Thunar doesn't have
split mode (nautilus's F3). As you say the default theme is not great, I
didn't like that focused and unfocused windows looked pretty much the same.

I don't know if it is better than gnome2 was but it pisses all over anything
gnome3. The xfce panel is better and easier to tweak than the gnome equivalent
(e.g adding a new item does not require finding a gap on the panel to right
click), the places panel shortcut is really handy, xfce-terminal seems faster
and less resource hungry when scrolling text than gnome-terminal, and I like
the whisker menu. I just wish they had gone with the solid Xfce 4.10 for the
LTS instead of the beta 4.11.

~~~
sampo
> Thunar doesn't have split mode (nautilus's F3).

But there is no need to use Thunar, just install Nautilus and add a launch
button for it into the panel.

...unless you're a heavy user of files on the desktop. But I think it's
possible to configure an alternative file manager to manage those, too.

~~~
pooper
Care to share us your arrangement? Perhaps we can ask them to change the
defaults?

------
someperson
Really exciting that people still yearn for classic GNOME2 desktop
environments! I know quite a few people who jumped ship from Ubuntu when Unity
starting being forced on everybody by default.

Lubuntu (LXDE) has always been a bit buggy for me, but still makes for great
systems (especially on older laptops).

Though I for one think the "halcyon" days of Ubuntu didn't just include a
snappy/stable user interface, it also included as default the warmest colour
themes ever, which somehow made even the dreariest night fun:
[https://www.google.com.au/search?q=ubuntu&biw=1527&bih=779&s...](https://www.google.com.au/search?q=ubuntu&biw=1527&bih=779&source=lnt&tbs=cdr%3A1%2Ccd_min%3A1%2F1%2F2004%2Ccd_max%3A2009&tbm=isch)

Not all software has to be cold and icy!

~~~
thejdude
Hell, I even switched to Windows 7 for a while, back when Fedora came only
with Gnome3. It didn't help, that at the time the Linux kernel also had some
general problems with power consumption.

By now, Gnome 3 is actually quite good, but still uses more power than MATE.

Cinnamon is slow and buggy as hell. Unity is just slow.

XFCE has become quite good, but still can't handle docking (or un/plugging an
external monitor) correctly. KDE neither (plus I don't like the IMHO horrible
interface).

So even after many years and years, Gnome2/MATE is still - IMHO - the best
desktop in Linuxland (and I also like it more than Windows 7, and a lot more
than Mac OS; back in the day I switched from Mac OS 10.4 to Ubuntu). It's not
about classic - it's about functionality, stability, performance,
configurability. But mostly that it just works and does everything the way you
expect.

Interesting that you liked the old Ubuntu colors. I liked them much better
than the current ones, but still considered them quite ugly compared to the
typical blue desktops of Windows, Mac OS or Fedora.

~~~
keithpeter
For those that _really_ prefer Gnome 2 there is always CentOS/Springdale
Linux/Scientific Linux/Oracle Linux version 6.x. Most projects providing
support until 2020.

Be prepared for the usual Enterprise Linux repository waggle dance (multiple
repositories required for a reasonable range of software and media codecs).
But it works rather well.

------
facorreia
I looked at the site but I couldn't find any explanation of why this exists
when there is Linux Mint Mate.[1]

[1]
[http://www.linuxmint.com/edition.php?id=160](http://www.linuxmint.com/edition.php?id=160)

~~~
sspiff
At first I thought the same, but then I remembered the problems I had with
Linux Mint. Most specifically, the inability to upgrade across releases.

~~~
steanne
Linux Mint has a Debian edition that is semi-rolling. I chose LMDE Mate,
though I recently installed xfce and am thinking about keeping it.

~~~
thejdude
I'd really like to switch to a Debian-based system, but ALL Debian-based
distros seem to have TERRIBLE battery life, whereas Mint 17 has an excellent
one (better than Arch/Manjaro or Fedora and on par with Windows 7). Sigh. And
yes, I'm using powertop. Without it, Linux battery life is horrible.

~~~
steanne
ah, i wouldn't know, i prefer a desktop. i have been looking at other rolling
distros, though. how did you like manjaro other than that?

~~~
thejdude
Manjaro (I tried the XFCE flavor) was really nice. It didn't support
Bluetooth, but at the time all distros were having some problems with
upgrading to BlueZ 5.

Regularly, they have some kind of update packs which they announce on their
blog/forums, in case you should get any problems, and the community seems very
nic. Definitely try it!

------
fingerprinter
Gotta love how people just won't let go and move on. Imagine if all the
diehard mac users ported OS9 to OSX because "OSX was forced on them".

It's called progress. Gnome2 was a dying project when Unity was announced.
Gnome3 was "coming soon", but flailing around. Unity is different, sure, but
so was OSX to a degree when it came out. People need to move on. Unity is the
present and future of Ubuntu. We've been talking about it for, what, 3 years
now? Move on, one way or another.

~~~
evilduck
There are tons of people who still bitch and moan about how OSX 10.6 was the
pinnacle of OSX, and that's been going on nearly 5 years. I've seen plenty of
people try to make Win8 look like XP too. There's a good percentage of people
who simply do not like change.

~~~
nitrogen
There is a difference between disliking change (ludditism) and not wanting to
have one's options removed involuntarily. There's no reason at all to enjoy
change for the worse -- if a new DE no longer supports one's highly efficient
workflow, and doesn't provide an equally efficient alternative, it is a change
for the worse.

------
pooper
I love Gnome 3. I don't like that sometimes virtual machines can't handle
Gnome 3 on older machines but it runs pretty well in a virtual machine in my
current notebook (y510p).

I don't understand the yearning for Gnome 2. Debian already has a Gnome
classic shell for computers that can't handle Gnome 3. It'd be nice if people
helped fix whatever they think is wrong with gnome 3 :(

~~~
vezzy-fnord
_It 'd be nice if people helped fix whatever they think is wrong with gnome 3
:(_

Wouldn't be possible if it involved fundamental design decisions.

~~~
steanne
that's what cinnamon was supposed to do.

~~~
vezzy-fnord
Two different philosophies. MATE is GNOME 2 brought to the modern world,
whereas Cinnamon comes from yearning for the new application base, but
thinking that the new shell just won't cut it. It was purely a fork of GNOME
Shell initially, the applications weren't ported until later. MATE was a full
fork from the start.

~~~
pooper
> fundamental design decisions

Besides the hefty minimum requirements, what other objections do you have to
gnome 3? Sorry, I don't have a UX or design background so can you please help
me understand in simple people language?

~~~
nycticorax
I can't speak for others, but here are my objections to Gnome 3:

1\. It is application-centric, rather than window-centric.

For instance, alt-tab tabs between applications, not between windows. This
doesn't mesh well with how I work: I want to alt-tab between different things
I'm working on, and alt-tabbing gets in the way of this. Often, I'll have a
bunch of terminal windows that are very much different things, or a bunch of
emacs windows that are different things, and I want alt-tab to switch between
all of them, regardless of which happen to be the same application.

Application-centricity also drives Gnome 3's behavior when you click on a
launcher icon for an already-running program, and the Gnome 3 behavior is less
useful to me than the Gnome 2 behavior.

2\. Sometimes I just want a window to get the heck out of my face. That's why
having a button to close a window is nice. Gnome 3 gets rid of this.

3\. ...but eventually I'll probably want to see that window again, and it's
nice to be able to see all my current windows at a glance on the bottom bar.
Gnome 3 got rid of this, also.

4\. I don't like having multiple desktops (I like to be able alt-tab between
any and all of my windows at a time). Gnome 3 structures the whole UI around
multiple desktops.

5\. I like having my pull-down menus attached to each window. When you have a
big screen, or multiple big screens, it takes a long time to scroll all the
way over to your primary screen to get at a pull-down menu. (Yes, I know about
Fitt's Law. But if you're far enough away from an on-the-screen-edge menu, it
will still be slower than a not-on-the-screen-edge menu that's nearby. I don't
know where that point happens, but it _feels_ like it happens pretty commonly
when you have two 30" monitors and your window is on the secondary one.)

6\. I like pull-down menus. They're been a central element of GUIs since 1984
at least. Gnome 3 seems to want to get rid of them, or at least add another
layer of clicks to get to them. All to get the amount of "chrome" off the
screen, because it supposedly distracts people or something. (Or so they say.
I think it's more because they're designers, and they perhaps value aesthetics
over functionality a bit more than I do.)

7\. Gnome 3 wants to support touch devices, and by their own admission many of
the design features are driven by this. This seems like a big mistake to me. I
think desktops and tablets/phones are different enough that they need
different UIs. Apple seems to agree with me (or I with them, really), and MS
seems to disagree. Do you hear a lot of good things about Windows 8?

8\. Even if you like the menubar to be at the top of the screen, I don't see
how anyone can think that Gnome 3 did this well. They've set aside that whole
top bar, and rather than putting something useful there (like, I don't know,
maybe pull-down menus?), they leave most of it blank and put a clock right in
the middle? And relegate the pull-down menus to a single application menu, so
you need any extra click to get to anything? The only advantage of the Gnome 3
top panel is that it looks nice. Which I think is a big reason they did it
that way.

9\. I know that a lot of these things can be configured to be like I'd prefer
them, but why would I do this, when Mate exists? It works like I want right
out of the box. And honestly, Linux desktops are generally at least slightly
janky in their default configurations. Using some super-customized
configuration just makes it that much more likely that something won't work
right.

10\. This whole "just get over it and move on" attitude about Gnome 3 is based
on the false assumption that it's a done deal, that Gnome 3 is the future, and
we're all stuck with it. We're not. (And we're certainly not stuck with the
Gnome 3 Shell.) If enough people say "no" to the Gnome 3 Shell, it will go
away. There are signs of this already: RHEL7 ships with Gnome 3 in classic
mode (or fallback mode, or whatever they're calling it this week), which is an
attempt to mimic many elements of the Gnome 2 interface. (Most of that mimicry
is only skin-deep, but that's another story.) Debian is considering shipping
with Xfce as the default interface. Mate is picking up momentum as a viable
alternative to Gnome 3. So I don't think it's clear that we're stuck with the
Gnome 3 shell, at least in its current form. There's still hope...

OK, that went a little far afield. But those are some of my objections to
Gnome 3.

~~~
pooper
I am not related to the Gnome team in any way. These are my uninformed
thoughts as a casual user:

1\. I've found this confusing as well. It is frustrating. For example, when I
have two terminal windows open (one root terminal window and a regular
terminal window).

2\. Not having a minimize probably helps get rid of complexity like where to
put the now minimized window. I can understand where they are coming from with
this. I've learned to live with this one.

3\. Not applicable. Sorry.

4\. I don't use multiple desktops unless I need to minimize a window (which
then I stow away to the second desktop).

5\. I have a 15" lcd display on my laptop... that's about it. Maybe you can
make your mouse move faster or make it cover more ground per distance of
physical movement? Just a thought...

6\. Pull down menus are going away. Multiple hierarchical menus and sub menus
are not good design. I know even though I don't know anything about design.

7\. Yes, now that you mention it a lot of what we discussed earlier (including
2: minimize windows) comes from the desire to have a united front when it
comes to user experience. Just because the implementation sucks doesn't
necessarily mean the ideas are bad. With continuity (that should have been a
drinking game at wwdc 14), Apple is dipping its toe in the water. There is a
massive risk of failure but the dream of one UI to rule them all is too big to
give up. Are we going to say "no, gnome doesn't need to run on touch-enabled
devices"?

9\. Defaults definitely matter. I think in terms of windows as well, for
example. Not applications. However, I can understand where they are going with
this in light of your number 7.

10\. It will be sad if Debian doesn't ship with Gnome. But at the end of the
day, I'll probably use whatever comes default. :) Just not a fan of sub sub
menus in pull downs. Reminds me of windows 9x start menu.

~~~
nycticorax
Not to beat a dead horse, but I wanted to respond to a couple things:

6\. I'm not sure we're talking about the same thing. To be more precise, the
thing that I like is the menu bar as a central organizing element of the
application, with the familiar "File", "Edit", etc. menus. I agree that having
even one level of submenus below these is suboptimal, and having two is
terrible. I think it remains to be seen whether they're going away. On OS X,
for one, they don't seem to be going anywhere, and that seems like a good
decision to me.

7\. I would prefer if Gnome, Canonical, etc. gave up on the idea that you're
going to run the same desktop and applications on a desktop as on a phone. I
think they should make a variant interface for touch devices, like Apple has
done. Of course "Gnome Desktop" and "Gnome Touch" should share code to the
extent possible, but I think the desktop and a phone are just too different to
share a common UI.

Honestly, I think Gnome 3 is in many ways the most polished and beautiful of
the Linux desktops, but they've made a few fundamental decisions that I just
can't get behind.

------
higherpurpose
Since the Ubuntu transition to Mir is imminent, will they wait until Ubuntu
comes out with Mir? (probably next version). I think the performance would be
even better with Mir on older hardware.

------
qwerta
Nice, but they should use different name and logo. I do not think this is real
Ubuntu project.

------
JasonFruit
Looking at the recommended hardware specs, I see that it absolutely requires
512MB RAM and recommends at least 2GB, yet it says it has modest hardware
requirements. Ubuntu Server has a minimum RAM requirement of 64MB and
recommends 256MB; I know an X server takes some memory, but does a reasonable
desktop environment have to require 448MB to 1.75GB to run?

Probably memory use is not a high priority, but it still seems like there's a
lot of waste.

~~~
bryanlarsen
I'm sure that are DE's that work well with less than 512MB of RAM, but there
aren't any modern web browsers that do. They're going to put 512MB as a
requirement no matter what the DE itself requires.

~~~
slacka
> there aren't any modern web browsers that do.

My parents old Athlon laptop with 512MB runs Linux Mint Mate and is fine for
their needs. When they started to complain about the browser slowing down, I
downgraded them to Firefox 13, and they were happy again. It's not ideal, but
modern enough for reading the news, emailing, and watching videos.

------
mandus
There are still days when I miss fvwm. Not because it was that great, but
because I used it for so long that my fingers still remember the keyboard
shortcuts I configured. But I moved to OSX and just had to adapt. I guess
moving on isn't always the most important thing, but stay productive. If that
mean staying with some old software I'm all for it.

------
kriro
Mate is pretty cool and a lot of people I know jumped ship to it from Unity.
Good luck with the project.

I personally use Xubuntu on my netbook, desktop and installed it on my
parent's computers as well. Arch+Mate or back to Debian+Mate has been on my
radar for a bit though.

------
doctorfoo
The classic Ubuntu look I used to love. Almost tempted to try it, though I'm
mostly happy with Linux Mint Cinnamon now.

------
V-2
It looks really ugly in my opinion.

------
andyl
I switched to Xubuntu and have grown to love XFCE more than I loved Gnome2.
Best features: ability to script and directly hack configuration settings,
basic features for window tiling. With scripts I can fully configure a dev box
with a single command.

~~~
TimSAstro
Interesting, I wondered if anyone else was playing with XFCE config this way.
I have the important parts of my .config/xfce4 folder under git and replicated
across 3 machines, which a branch for dual-screen tweaks on the desktop, etc.
etc. I thought it was so cool that you can just figure this stuff out and get
on with it!

~~~
andyl
My old setup had a mix of single-monitor and dual-monitor machines. Now I use
single-monitor on all machines and found you can replicate the entire
.config/xfce4 directory, even with different screen sizes. Everything syncs
perfectly - Hotkeys, Menus, Panels etc. Works with git or rsync - so simple.

------
Retr0spectrum
By some coincidence, my laptop exactly meets the minimum requirements!

------
mahouse
Another distro? Why maintain something like this when you can just install the
same packages (including themes) on, for example, Debian?

~~~
leorocky
I don't think this qualifies as a separate distro unless you also think
Kubuntu and Xubuntu are separate distros. They are just Ubuntu with different
packages for the UI preinstalled. You can probably install them side by side
and switch to one or the other.

~~~
Pacabel
I think it's fair to consider them as different distros, at least in practice,
given how much the choice of a desktop environment can affect the user
experience. A lot of the software available by default will differ, obviously.
Instructions about how to use the system differ, as well. The default
capabilities and functionality will differ. The bugs affecting them will
differ. All of those differences add up.

~~~
scrollaway
"Different defaults" is not really something that differenciates distros.
Lubuntu, Xubuntu, Kubuntu etc have a name: They're remixes of an existing
distro.

~~~
Pacabel
That's not very good reasoning. You're basically saying that Fedora and Ubuntu
are the same distro, because differences in the default package manager and
other core software are irrelevant. Clearly that's not the case.

It is the defaults that matter. They're what give a particular distribution
its unique characteristics.

Sure, you can go out of your way to install the software necessary to make one
distribution comparable to some other distribution, but that doesn't mean
they're really the same to begin with, even if their names may be similar.

~~~
sfilipov
What makes distributions different are mainly the package manager and the
packages in the repositories.

Your example with Fedora and Ubuntu is a bad one because they use different
package managers. Fedora uses yum and Ubuntu uses apt. This is one of the
biggest differences that two distributions can have. They are different enough
people get advice to stick to one and build some experience with it. If a
person is using Debian on the servers, then he better stick to Ubuntu or Mint
as a desktop (if he uses Linux as a desktop at all). On the other hand CentOS
users are better off with Fedora or OpenSUSE.

The difference between Debian, Ubuntu and Mint is more subtle but they are
still different. For one they are maintained by different people. One could
argue that Xubuntu and Ubuntu are also maintained by different people which is
true for the Desktop Environments, but it is also true that the kernel of both
is maintained by the same people and they use the same kernel at any given
time.

Another one is that Ubuntu and Xubuntu have exactly the same repositories for
a given release. Mint is based on the repositories of Ubuntu and many (most)
packages are the exactly the same, but then Mint has some extra packages
specific to their distro.

As a result most of the time you can follow a 14.04 guide and apply it to Mint
17 and everything will be OK but there is the occasional difference.

~~~
thejdude
"What makes distributions different are mainly the package manager and the
packages in the repositories."

...and the packaging/updating philosophy, the packaging/defaults, the
configurability. How they handle your hardware (hotplugging printers,
monitors, mice). Batteries included or not. Power management.

E.g. Fedora always uses the latest upstream packages and doesn't patch them
very much. Debian/Ubuntu/Mint use stable packages and patch them heavily. Many
years ago one such patch in the (stable) Ubuntu kernel broke my (officially
supported) file system, causing data loss. OTOH, Fedora can be a bit harsh to
use for newbies.

