Is Mate a good alternative?

UnoSD · Apprentice Joined: 27 Jun 2011 Posts: 273

Hi everyone,

It's been months now that I've migrated from the OpenRC/Gnome2 paradigm to SystemD/Gnome3 (I was forced to because of portage);

I was really disappointed when I found out that, despite the fact the version of Gnome 3 + Gnome Shell is marked as stable (and 3.12.2 now), it's just a massive amount of bugs connected together.

First of all, I got rid of nautilus (unfortunately, in a "hacky" way), and installed Nemo, hoping it would have been better, but, as it was hacky, the system was not so happy in every situation.

There was no way to use nautilus as it was crashing continuously and had some absurd new behavior with which I was absolutely unfamiliar and they were annoying (see: open the folder when you hover a file over it...).

Handling 2 screens is another nightmare... Crashes, weird aspect et cetera...

But now I had enough, I was copying sensitive data and it is hanging every time, when the amount of data is big enough. I loved GNU/Linux and Gentoo for their stability, but now it's becoming ridiculous....

I wanted to stay up-to-date, that's why I was using these new technologies, but, to be honest, I prefer obsolete but working ones...

What do you guys think of MATE? Is it any good? I know Gnome2 was rock-stable, but I don't know anything about the guys who took it over. I'd like to hear some opinion before moving everything to it; any downside?

Sorry for the outburst, but I'm really disappointed.

Thanks.

RazielFMX · l33t Joined: 23 Apr 2005 Posts: 835 Location: NY, USA

I've heard good things about MATE (and to a lesser extent Cinnamon though I think Cinnamon has some Gnome3 deps) from coworkers.

However, before the forks became mainstream, I had dropped Gnome 2 for KDE4 in anticipation of Gnome 3. I personally would never choose to go back to Gnome/GTK anything after working in the KDE/QT world. That being said, if I didn't have a box with the horsepower to run my full blown KDE with the eye candy cranked up, I'd definitely consider MATE (though would probably end up running fluxbox given my utter disgust with the direction of gnome and its ilk).

If you love Gnome2, MATE is a great choice. If you are tempted to learn something new (and it takes some learning due to configuration option overload), I encourage you to give KDE4 a try.

UnoSD · Apprentice Joined: 27 Jun 2011 Posts: 273

sgarcia · Posted: Tue Aug 19, 2014 9:00 pm Post subject:

I'm still struggling with Gnome 2 on my Gentoo systems, but the latest UDEV shenanigans have pushed me closer to the edge of making some kind of change.

On the other hand, I've been using Mate on my Mint machines and have been very happy with it. Almost all my labs use Linux Mint with Mate (except for one where I'm trying out KDE) and it has so far seemed to work as smoothly as Gnome 2. The only reason I haven't switched my Gentoo machines over is that I don't have the time right now to figure out just what I need to do to make the switch. The mask settings to get Gnome 2 to stay around will probably have to be changed out, etc. Then I'll have to take the time to rebuild my desktop configuration. Even though Mate is essentially the same as Gnome 2, the actual configuration files aren't the same.
_________________
Ignorance killed the cat. Curiosity was framed.

ycUygB1 · Posted: Sat Aug 23, 2014 9:12 am Post subject:

I went through the same process. When Gnome 3 came out, I tried it and hated it plus the systemd dependence.
After trying KDE, Cinnamon, Mate, and some tiling desktops, I have settled on Mate and OpenRC.

There is really no reason to choose anything else, as far as I can see. The tiling desktops are slightly faster,
but not really enough to be worth the effort to use them, IMHO.

Roman_Gruber · Posted: Sat Aug 23, 2014 9:22 am Post subject:

I used mate for a while and it is unsatisfying.

It is half baked as any of those slim desctop environments called xfce, mate, lxde, ...

I ended up using i3wm.