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GNOME Open Source Software

Fedora 18 To Feature the GNOME2 Fork MATE 202

dsinc writes "It's not just Mint: Fedora will also feature MATE in their upcoming release (Fedora 18). According to Fedora's Dan Mashal, 'many users have expressed interest in this feature since Fedora 15 in which Fedora was switched from GNOME 2 to GNOME 3.'" This follows shortly after news that MATE 1.4 has been released. New features includes file sharing over bluetooth, updated backends for mate-keyring and libmatekeyring, new themes for the notification daemon, and improvements to the Caja file manager. MATE is being included in Sabayon as well.
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Fedora 18 To Feature the GNOME2 Fork MATE

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  • Way to go. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday July 31, 2012 @01:52PM (#40832283)

    Too many people have problems with GNOME 3. Good to have a choice.

  • . i have been running mate on ubuntu through a ppa but mainline support or even a full spin like xfce and kde have would be nice. hmm Mubuntu?

    • Maybe Cinnabuntu with Cinnamon desktop? Sounds tasty!

      • Cinnabuntu sounds quite good... better than cubuntu (be very careful with that spelling now!)

        However, putting a different front end on top of Ubuntu seems to be self-defeating, the whole point of Ubuntu is that is an all-in-one supported-with-default options thing. If you want configurability, there are plenty of alternatives. Ubuntu is a kind of 'Windows for the linux world' and tries to ape the things that made Windows popular.

        • what are you babbling about, there is Xubuntu and Kubuntu already

          • I know there is, I'm saying its probably a bad idea, especially as kubuntu is not supported by Canonical [arstechnica.com].

            Hence my point, if you want to use Ubuntu, stick with the 'official' flavour only. If you want a non-Unity flavour, go with a different distro. Ubuntu wants to be a pre-packaged Linux, let it be.

      • we could call it Linux Mint 13 (Maya) with Cinnamon.

  • Splendid decision (Score:5, Insightful)

    by blind biker ( 1066130 ) on Tuesday July 31, 2012 @01:53PM (#40832305) Journal

    I was disheartened with the shipwreck that Gnome 3 decided to become, so MATE was a very positive development. And while I'm not a Fedora user (just not my cup of tea), it's a very popular distro, and seeing them adopt MATE added a huge momentum to the project (a bit like when IBM adopted Java - it boosted it enormously).

    • by Tarlus ( 1000874 )

      (just not my cup of tea)

      I see what you did there.

      (The namesake of MATE) [wikipedia.org]

  • But wait... (Score:5, Funny)

    by wordsnyc ( 956034 ) on Tuesday July 31, 2012 @01:53PM (#40832311) Homepage

    Seadog 19 will feature Matey, the DE that comes with a talking parrot (but doesn't support 3D).

  • by sethstorm ( 512897 ) on Tuesday July 31, 2012 @01:55PM (#40832333) Homepage

    Given how many decent, albeit old, chips covered by the Gnome 3 blacklist - this shouldn't be a surprise.

    In addition, not much was ever said about the blacklist other than "R100/R200/$chip just can't handle it" without specifying how something that worked in Gnome 3.0 didn't work in later versions. The excuse generally has been along the lines of "STFU and enjoy the fallback, since your chip is too old" without a reasonable explanation of why it even happened. Never mind that Gnome 3 goes out of its way to make sure a blacklisted chipset stays in fallback to the best of its ability - without any opportunity to override.

  • by Picass0 ( 147474 ) on Tuesday July 31, 2012 @01:58PM (#40832371) Homepage Journal

    Thank you for the outbreak of common sense from the Fedora team. I've been using KDE since Gnome 3 arrived.

  • by slackware 3.6 ( 2524328 ) on Tuesday July 31, 2012 @02:09PM (#40832559)
    Fedora was the first to jump on Gnome 3. They should work on getting the kinks out instead of trying to go back in time or trying to be a crappy Mint wannabe with no codecs. My boxes have been geting switched over to Mageia (from F 16 & 17) because fewer updates and more stable with Gnome 3.
    If you take away Gnome 3 and Unity you will lose alot of new linux users. New users want something cool and flashy not something that looks like a clone of Windows from years past.
    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Says you. You must be some part-time home-hobby geek or something.

      The rest of us who actually work every day with linux on our desktops just want to get our work done and want to be able to do things without 17 mouse movements all over the desktop trying to make a mouse emulate a touch-screen.

      • Keyboard shortcuts help alot and so does a trackball. If I have anthing important Slackware or Debian to the rescue. But face it most computers are for games or internet access. My 3 year old can log in to the computer (3 letter pasword on kids account) and play SuperTux better than me his needs and his babysitters needs are not my needs. And Firefox looks just as good from Gnome 3 as it does from any other DE.
    • by Ignacio ( 1465 ) on Tuesday July 31, 2012 @03:45PM (#40833989)

      They should work on getting the kinks out instead of trying to go back in time or trying to be a crappy Mint wannabe with no codecs.

      GNOME 3 doesn't have "kinks", it has major usability regressions. They can't be "gotten out", they must be destroyed.

      New users want something cool and flashy not something that looks like a clone of Windows from years past.

      Only if you want all your new users to be teenage kids.

      • Would you rather all the teenage kids use Win 8 or OSX? Maybe a few will think its cool and look a little further under the hood. People don't really use Ubuntu on any machine other than what amounts to toys do they. I'd freak if I found out my banks computer systems ran off Mint for example.
    • Remember that Fedora is the testing grounds for RHEL.
      Without Mate RHEL would have to go to Gnome3 in the next major release. The user base would not accept the usability issues.

    • by ADRA ( 37398 )

      I always assumed people wanted a piece of software that worked, and did what you want from it. If a desktop operating system can't do simple tasks that a normal user is assustomed to, then it is a failure.

      From a personal value judgement, if you have to sacrafice functionality (regarless of if its the way YOU work) for a design philosophy, you'ew probably going to alienate a ton of people who will abandon your endeavors. There are many many reasons for 'new' Linux users that have nothing to do with crazy odd

      • f**k me, you're saying the software is there for the benefit of its users and no the other way round?!!?!?!!

        no way! As if! inconceivable!

    • by jc79 ( 1683494 ) on Tuesday July 31, 2012 @05:34PM (#40835507)

      Eh? No one's removing Gnome 3 from Fedora. MATE is being added as an extra desktop environment. Gnome 3 will still be the default. This is an additional feature, not a replacement.

      • by arth1 ( 260657 )

        Eh? No one's removing Gnome 3 from Fedora. MATE is being added as an extra desktop environment. Gnome 3 will still be the default.

        Not for long if they can't get it to work reliably and identically across different platforms and hardware.

        Remember who foots the bill - me and thousands of other Red Hat Enterprise Linux customers who each put thousands of dollars into Red Hat every year. We expect RHEL 7 and 8 to be based on stable versions of Fedora that actually work, consistently and identically for all our machines, whether they be workstations with super graphics cards and quad monitors or servers with low-end graphics serving remot

    • by epyT-R ( 613989 )

      it's possible to have aesthetics without compromising functionality, but that's not what these new interfaces do (gnome 3/unity/metro/windows phone/ios'd osx etc). they sacrifice functionality (lots of it) for the sake of looks and a flat learning curve.. the problem is that flat learning curves come with flat power curves. it doesn't need to be either extreme, just a sane default in the middle somewhere, with extensibility/configurability to get it where the user needs it.

  • This is being blown way out of proportion. We're all acting like this means that Fedora is dropping GNOME 3 for MATE or something crazy like that. From what I can tell they're simply just porting the packages to Fedora, nothing more. Maybe they'll offer a version with MATE as the default configuration, but this doesn't show any signs of replacing GNOME 3 in the future. Lets be realistic and read the articles, folks.

    Also, unrelated, but I feel like the GNOME 3 hate is really blown out of proportion. Sure, so

    • by blind biker ( 1066130 ) on Tuesday July 31, 2012 @03:10PM (#40833479) Journal

      Also, unrelated, but I feel like the GNOME 3 hate is really blown out of proportion. Sure, some users were driven away, but the exact same thing happened with GNOME 2 and people called it trash and crap and whatever else. By the time that GNOME 3 is mature and more stable, it will have a large userbase again. I can guarantee it. I, personally, really love it as it is, especially how easily extensible it is. I don't know another desktop that allows so many customization options through extensions like that. You can really change near everything with a little tweak and you can write one yourself in minutes.

      That's bullshit - I was there when Gnome 2 was born. There were some critics, but nowhere near the backlash that accompanies Gnome 3.

      Your post reminds me exactly of the Windows Vista apologists: they would say things like "When Windows XP came out, there were just as many people who hated it. like the ones who hate Vista. In the end, it will be a success like XP." Turns out, all those apologists were full of shit, and Vista really is the turd that everybody thought it was.

      • by Anne Thwacks ( 531696 ) on Tuesday July 31, 2012 @03:28PM (#40833717)
        By the time that GNOME 3 is mature and more stable, it will have a large userbase again.And Gnome 4 will replace it with new, improved bugs and an incomprehensible UI

        FTFY

      • Vista wasn't crap, though. For me it was perfectly usable. It had a few quirks here and there but doesn't every OS? Not only that but what's so bad about liking GNOME 3?

        Oh, and could you please use more profanity? You're coming off as too mature for me to handle.

    • By the time that GNOME 3 is mature and more stable, it will have a large userbase again.

      Man, that's a terribly bad way to manage a large software project.

      I, for one, wish my Linux desktop environment had less "throw it all out and start over" regressions

      I'd like to see more carefully planned upgrades that have less breakage while still moving forward in smaller increments.

      • This. Pretty much all desktop environments in Linux world are released way too early in mainline distro releases, while their quality is still something that would be counted as alpha or beta level if they were commercial software!
    • by Yenya ( 12004 )

      Also, unrelated, but I feel like the GNOME 3 hate is really blown out of proportion. Sure, some users were driven away, but the exact same thing happened with GNOME 2 and people called it trash and crap and whatever else.

      And they were right.

      I have been using GNOME since GNOME 1 times, and I think for former GNOME users the GNOME 3 fiasco is not something unexpected, it is a logical outcome of the overall trend in GNOME development.

      I remember Sawmill/Sawfish being replaced by Metacity, which even in the latest GNOME 2 releases was not able to do things which were supported in Sawfish since day 1 and still are.

      I remember Galeon being pushed out of GNOME and replaced by Epiphany (seriously, did anybody used Epiphany?), and aga

    • Also, unrelated, but I feel like the GNOME 3 hate is really blown out of proportion. Sure, some users were driven away, but the exact same thing happened with GNOME 2 and people called it trash and crap and whatever else. By the time that GNOME 3 is mature and more stable, it will have a large userbase again. I can guarantee it. I, personally, really love it as it is, especially how easily extensible it is. I don't know another desktop that allows so many customization options through extensions like that. You can really change near everything with a little tweak and you can write one yourself in minutes.

      I didn't even notice when Gnome 2 took over.

      Unlike Gnome 3, it didn't remove about 4 major desktop features that I use all day long each and every day with no way to restore them.

  • Fedora is going to continue to be a Gnome 3 distro. They are not doing anything special with Mate, they are just going to package it for people that wants to install it.

    Since when packaging something is newsworthy?

  • Car analogy (Score:4, Insightful)

    by gagol ( 583737 ) on Tuesday July 31, 2012 @02:28PM (#40832907)

    The vehicle driving interface have not changed much in the last 80 years or so. This has not stopped us to innovate vehicles. Imagine that every 10 years or so, car manufacturers decided that a steering wheel and pedals are out of fashion and should be replaced by something fundamentally different.

    The mess we have today in many fields is related to our priorities as a specie. We placed eyecandy before efficiency and this means we place a tremendous amount of energy in entertainment, games and trendy gadgets that sole goals are to steer attention away from real problems by having an entertainment industry so huge.

    \

    • Let's be honest: steering wheels, pedals and levers should have been replaced by now.

    • Specie means coin. "Species" is both singular and plural, referring to groups or categories of living things.
  • Perhaps this will serve as a wake-up-call to other distros (*cough* ubuntu *cough*).
    New shinies are nice. Choice is better.

  • its good to fork once in a while to keep the projects momentum going and bring in new blood?

  • ....so looking forward to using MATE when it's finished compiling some time in 2014. :-)

    • ....so looking forward to using MATE when it's finished compiling some time in 2014. :-)

      That is just 1.5 Grateful Dead songs away!

  • by rrohbeck ( 944847 ) on Tuesday July 31, 2012 @04:22PM (#40834585)

    Where is Debian? I still don't see Mate in the standard repos, let alone as an installation option (or, preferably, the default.)
    I've been running XFCE4 for a while but, frankly, the longer I use it the more issues I find. Like VNC and NX interoperability, or the infamous xfce4-terminal hang that just caused me to lose some work last night.

    • Someone brought up the possibility of mate in debian but debian doesn't like code duplication (it's not exactly forbidden but it's strongly discouraged). It could still happen of course but if and when it does it will be controversial.

      For debian i386 and amd64 users the mate guys offer packages but users of other debian architectures are less lucky.

  • Trinity [trinitydesktop.org]. Not everyone likes KDE v4. :P

  • Desktop environments and toolkits have been horribly fragmented on *NIX systems since the beginning of X. I guess the Linux community is just carrying on that grand tradition.

    I've been a GNOME (on Ubuntu) user for about 4 years, and was more or less planning to migrate to KDE when I finally upgrade to 12.04 as I really detest Unity and GNOME 3 just feels incomplete. I've also considered XFCE... I guess I really ought to give MATE a closer look too.

  • > 2012
    > Not having switched to XFCE4 long ago due to GNOME being a complete failure
    come on, guys. Really?

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