Please keep supporting the MATE desktop.

[RickBlue70]

The MATE desktop on the Linux Mint 12 live DVD allowed me to access the GUI desktop menu selections.
I am currently testing the Linux Mint 12 live DVD on an old Dell Optiplex 240 tower PC with an old Acer 17 inch LCD monitor.
None of the GNOME selections (GNOME, GNOME CLASSIC, GNOME CLASSIC with no effects) gave me access to the menu panel.
Only the MATE selection gave me access to the menu panel, and thus all the applications that I wanted to test in the live mode.
Thank you,
Rick
P.S. Again I repeat myself: Please keep supporting the MATE desktop.

[mustard]

I'm keen for MATE to be supported too. It seems that some people think Gnome 2's days are over, but I never understood why the Gnome Foundation had to move away from it. It is a perfectly good desktop environment that is loved by many. I would be extremely pleased to see MATE become another standard for linux desktop environments.

[AlbertP]

Mate will be replaced with Cinnamon in future. But it's far from ready at the moment. When Cinnamon is ready to replace Mate, Mate will most likely be dropped.

Oh yes, when you don't have access to the menu panel in Gnome 3, you most likely lack a graphics driver and are in fact running Gnome Classic, in which the menu is at the top (applications, places and system) instead of the bottom. You can run this command to see what graphics card you're using:

Code: Select all

inxi -Gx

Perhaps you didn't see the buttons at the top which are the 'menu' of Gnome classic?

Edit. I found the specs of your computer. It has Intel 845 graphics which might not be able to run Gnome Shell, and that's why you get Gnome Classic.

[viking777]

I like the look of Cinnamon I must say. I have just spent 2 days trying to achieve what Clem is striving for here with the help of downloads and extensions etc, and although I have been relatively successful I think the concept of Cinnamon would make for a much better DE than I could ever hope to achieve on my own. But I have huge concerns here. Clem has made some excellent decisions in recent times. Ignoring Unity, incorporating Mate for the gnome-shell phobic, even holding back gnome-shell 3.0 in LMDE because it is so second rate compared to 3.2. But although he undoubtedly has the ability to code something like this, does he have the time? Like most of us, I am sure he has to eat, sleep and defecate, as well as managing Mint Main, LMDE, along with all the various different 'flavours' of those two, and now he is writing Cinnamon as well? Maybe he even has a family, I don't know (if he does I hope they are very independent).

There have already been desertions from the LMDE camp recently because it hasn't had an update in months (I myself have stopped using 'incoming' because I find it a waste of disk space in its totally static state - although I understand and mostly agree with the reasons it has been so static, many people do not understand this and are leaving because they feel let down). I just wonder how long it will be before LMDE 'latest' gets an update pack whilst Clem busy is writing a new DE?

If the man can really achieve all this at the same time then good luck to him, he is certainly an asset to the LInux community, but if he is going to start projects up (like LMDE latest) and not have the time to follow through on them, then his talent is going to be eclipsed by his ambitions. I hope that doesn't happen but it must be a possibility.

[AlbertP]

He's really not doing it on his own. There are numerous commits by others (mainly glebihan) in Cinnamon.

[viking777]

He's really not doing it on his own. There are numerous commits by others (mainly glebihan) in Cinnamon.

Ah I see. I have got to be honest and say this thread was the first time had I ever heard about Cinnamon, so I haven't read much about it and got the impression it was another project Clem had started up by himself. Obviously not. Thanks.

Maybe the 'LMDE latest' people will get their update pack 4 after all then (if there are any of them left ).

[AlbertP]

Cinnamon is fully open-source and anyone can help developing it.
https://github.com/linuxmint/Cinnamon

[/Zoran\]

I agree with OP, PLEASE DON'T ABANDON MATE!!!!!

Gnome 3/shell/msege/cinnamon/whatever cannot replace what gnome2/mate offers, and not everyone is absolutely positively amazed by how this cinnamon thing looks.....

[viking777]

I'm sorry Zoran and OP, but I think Mate's future on Mint is severely limited, if it wasn't, Cinnamon wouldn't exist. It happened to me three years ago when KDE trashed the best DE that ever existed KDE3, they still haven't repaired the damage they did, and they never will because they don't have the will to do so. It is not quite the same with Mate because in my opinion this was only ever intended as a stopgap measure between gnome2 and gnome3, whereas KDE 4 was and still is considered to be the future . The point is that this happens often with Linux (or all distros really - remember Windows ME?). You just have to live with it and move on. The difference between Windows and Linux is that the latter offers you a huge choice of alternatives, the former never did and never will.

[/Zoran\]

That's just it, I don't really see those alternatives, everything has moved up to KDE or gnome 3. KDE at least KDE 4 I can't use, It's just too much of a plastic feeling if I do, plus it uses a lot of resources. Gnome 3 has been striped down of a lot of functionality that gnome 3 had, not just because of all eye candy that is gnome shell, but also because some things, like the network manager has lost a lot of functions, I'm reading that printer control also lost a lot of function, at least when it comes to GUI controls. KDE suffers the same ills, for example you cannot connect via ADSL in kde network manager, you can create a connection, but it's a whole different story to actually connect.

Xfce is ok, but the best feeling that I had was with Gnome 2, and a lot of distributions are dropping support for it. You could basically use it, it probably works with Arch or Gentoo, I'm not sure though, but I really don't want to spend half of my time troubleshooting errors, or installing applications from source. Plus I'm now reading in another thread that linux distros won't even load on some laptops, this goes double when it comes to loading of gnome 3/shell same thing happened to me on a desktop of a friend of mine.

After gnome 3, unity and everything else that ranted about before, I went back to windows xp, what can I say, it works. Now I installed mint 12 to try mate, and I love it, if it's true that it's leaving mint for this cinnamon, I'm gonna delete mint this very instant and leave linux for good. I had enough drama with OS's. I'm not saying that anybody should care for me leaving, just getting it off my chest.....or whatever...

[Kevin108]

I checked out MATE again. It would be great if the fonts didn't look so awful. Screenlets and Raiendar2 were essentially useless.

[/Zoran\]

Font's aren't a problem on my end, and I don't use screenlets or the other thing that you mentioned I changed fonts and they are ok now, I realize that there are still some glitches with MATE, for example, editing menus, alacarte, which is what gnome used doesn't work, and I can't seem to find a GUI for User managment, I would install the from gnome, but I don't know what it was called exactly, I hope that these problems aren't that hard to fix....