MATE (GNOME 2 Fork) For The Fedora Desktop?

[liam]

I personally think that Fedora should just give up on GNOME and switch to KDE.

S'funny, I was thinking the same thing, and once they do that the kde devs should quit the project and join gnome.

[grege]

Gnome is backed by a large community and heavyweight corporate sponsors. Mate is "just this guy you know" to quote Douglas Adams.

Unless the big names jump on board then Mate just becomes a frozen in time snapshot of Gnome 2.34, while everyone else marches into the future.

Instead of carrying on in forums I adopted Gnome 3.0 and now 3.2. I looked at what I needed and wanted and went out and found the extensions to bend the Gnome-Shell to what I want. That is not necessarily what you want, but that is the beauty of the new Gnome - it is infinitely malleable. Make it what you want by picking and choosing extensions and themes. Set up your very own "me" desktop that is different to anyone else's.

Try that with Gnome 2.x or any of the others.

[Nobu]

Not impressed with any gnome2 fork. Well, impressed if they get it in good shape and get some momentum, but I'd be more impressed if they used gtk+3 instead of gtk+2.

How does having to use different named application equal to having less choise...

He needs to use that application, or else he has no way to choose another theme. Thus, less choice.

[bwat47]

IMO forking gnome 2 is a colossal waste of time. First of all one of the reasons gnome 3 was a huge re-write was gnome 2 was becoming difficult to maintain. Efforts would be better spend contributing to XFCE, which with more polish would be an amazing replacement for gnome 2, or if you really want to fork something fork the gnome 3 panel and give it some much need polish.

[kraftman]

Gnome is backed by a large community and heavyweight corporate sponsors.

I'd love to know what those corporate sponsors gave to Gnome. I can't name a thing.

[drag]

If people want to put up the effort and time to support MATE on Fedora then it will happen.

If people expect that their demands matter one whit when they are telling other people that they should put the work in to support on MATE on Fedora, then they are confused.

[ssam]

imagine if all the main distros decided that BTRFS is pretty much ready, and so removed ext3/4 from the kernel. Its has loads of great new features, the missing features you either dont really need, or they will be read RealSoonNow, and it does not crash too often on my machine. That is basically what has happened with gnome 3. (except ubuntu said, that's crazy logic, we will use Reiser instead).

I agree that gnome 3 has lots of great new things in it. but
It is slow on my netbook (about 2 seconds to go to activity view)
It fails if I plug in an external monitor (my GPU can't span wider than 2k pixels, has some bugs in vertical mode, https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=663690 )
it crashes sometimes ( https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=757478 , https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=759661 )
i find some of the new behaviour awkward (e.g. alt-tab, hidden notifications, lack of panel apps).

fall back mode does not solve much.

maybe in a few years these issues will be solved. And i'll happily test development software and report bugs. but it would be nice to have something stable and useful to work with. MATE seems to be the answer to this. (i have tried xfce, openbox and KDE, and none meets what want in a DE)

there is also bluebubble http://k3rnel.net/tag/bluebubble/

[kraftman]

imagine if all the main distros decided that BTRFS is pretty much ready, and so removed ext3/4 from the kernel. Its has loads of great new features, the missing features you either dont really need, or they will be read RealSoonNow, and it does not crash too often on my machine. That is basically what has happened with gnome 3. (except ubuntu said, that's crazy logic, we will use Reiser instead).

I've got your point, but I don't like this analogy - btrfs is and will be worse in some scenarios, because of its COW design. There's also another flaw in this analogy - btrfs has more features at this point while Gnome3 has much less same time.

[elsie]

Only disto to include it so far is Linux Mint. I personally doubt that it will make it into any major distros repositories but well who knows.

It's available in Arch Linux, it's available in Ubuntu (unofficially), it's in Mint officially & now maybe Fedora.

What would Ubuntu have benefited from forking Gnome 2? Even if they were to provide Gnome 2 like experience it would make absolutely no sense to base it on Gnome 2. Gnome has hundreds of developers and forking the code means huge amount of added work with little to no benefit.

The code is already there. How much work is there to fork the code & maintain it/update it? One guy was able to fork it...

How does having to use different named application equal to having less choise...

Maybe I'm getting caught up in semantics...

Mate is not OS but rather a desktop environment. .

My bad - the OS comment....I've used Linux/GNU long enough to know better than to call a DE an OS. Apologies.

Configurability has never been a strenght of Gnome

True enough...

[Teho]

It's available in Arch Linux, it's available in Ubuntu (unofficially), it's in Mint officially & now maybe Fedora.

Being avaible doesn't mean it's included (as in default repository or offically maintained). It's avaible for Arch Linux as unoffical repository maintained by some community member and same for Ubuntu and Fedora.

The code is already there. How much work is there to fork the code & maintain it/update it? One guy was able to fork it...

It's possible that I have misunderstood what you have meant but forking project like Gnome means that you are responssible for all future developement. Mate is project that has no future as anything else except frozen Gnome 2.32. It should be obvious that Ubuntu doesn't want that as it's essential for Ubuntu to move foward. Not to mention that Ubuntu seemingly doesn't have any intrest to maintain classical Gnome environment regardless of what "Gnome" does. If they wanted to provide classical Gnome user exprerience they could/would simply base it on Gnome 3 not fork the deprecated Gnome 2.32.