Looking for my MATE

[LienRag]

Hi all.

I installed Mint 18 Mate edition on my father's computer and was a bit surprised to find Cinnamon on it.

After some queries I understand that it's actually MATE, not Cinnamon, but with whisker-menu on it so that if feels like Cinnamon.

No biggie (I love Cinnamon) except that the reason I chose MATE is to get him used to the traditional MATE interface so that when he'll lose sight and want to switch to hypra.fr 's solution for visually impaired (which uses Debian MATE) he won't have to learn a new interface, only to get used to the accessibility settings.

So, how to get back to standard MATE interface on Mint 18 (and, soon, 19)?

[LienRag]

I upgraded to Tara (Mint 19) but it's still Whisker-Menu.
On another forum (https://www.linuxquestions.org/question ... ost5216405) someone said to go to Menu>All Applications>Preferences>Startup applications (in order to do the reverse of what I want)
But on the screen that Startup applications launches there is no mention of whisker-menu, only mate-settings-daemon.
And even if I guess that's where the whisker-menu is configured, I can't find a way to configure the settings of mate to my liking.
The Preferences>Desktop Parameters gives me the choice between Marco or Compiz or others but if I'm not misguided that's not the problem.

So, what would be the solution?

[trytip]

paste output of this for both computers:
inxi -Fxzd

[LienRag]

Sorry, what other computer?

The relevant part of inxi's result is

Code: Select all

Desktop: MATE 1.20.1 (Gtk 3.22.30-lubuntu1)

How does that affect my question?

[trytip]

i phrased it wrong, i thought you had cinnamon and mate installed and wanted the inxi output for both desktops. if you say you have mate then how is it you found cinnamon on it? whisker menu is from xfce desktop.

one way yo find out if you have more then one desktop is log off and choose another session.

[smurphos]

Is it just the menu applet that you need to change?. Mint Mate uses Mint-Menu (which is Mint specific) by default.

But The Mate's projects Main-Menu and Menu-Bar are available to select as alternatives.

If so right click on the menu, untick locked to panel if it is locked and then remove from panel. Then right click on an empty space in the panel, select add to panel and then chose either Main-Menu or Menu-Bar as per your preferences.

[LienRag]

Seems the thing that I'm looking for, thanks.
But just in case it is not, how do I go back to the present situation once I have unlocked to panel?

[smurphos]

Seems the thing that I'm looking for, thanks.
But just in case it is not, how do I go back to the present situation once I have unlocked to panel?

Right click on the panel and select reset panel to return it to it's default state.

BTW - you may need to unlock the other applets to allow you to move (via right click menu) any newly added applet to the desired location.

Mate's panel management UI drives me nuts...I don't think there is a way to lock/unlock all applets with one action. I may be wrong....it's not my goto DE.

[LienRag]

Thanks.
But it's more than the menu applet that I need to change, apparently - I want the normal MATE experience.
It seems that with your technique I can do that by creating a new panel on top, putting the Mate menu applet on it and then all the other applets one by one, and then deleting the lower pane, but isn't there a way to do all in one setting?

[smurphos]

Sorry for the delayed reply.

The problem here is knowing what the 'Normal Mate experience'. As far as I know pretty much all distros that ship a Mate version will tweak the defaults to a greater or lesser degree as per their vision of the basic ideal set up - hence you can't do it with one click in Mint Mate as that just sets the Mint teams vision of how a Linux Mint (MATE) desktop should look. All of the editions (XFCE, Mate and Cinnamon) at first glance on a fresh install have the same basic set-up albeit some of the applet functionality differs slightly between DE's. As a user it's up to you whether you carry on with that default or tweak as allowed by the DE.

I'm sure you can manually set it up to your liking. You might want to install some additional mate packages not included in the default Mint edition (pluma, mate-menu etc).

You might find mate-tweak useful (again not installed by default in Mint Mate) - it includes two alternative default mate configs - Gnome2 and Fedora - which you can select in one click - maybe one of those is your 'Normal Mate experience'