Mate Desktop Environment - GNOME2 fork

[DoubleClicker]

Getting back to the concerns that have been expressed for "Maté" as the name for this project, given the various meanings attached to the word "Mate" in English, it's important to remember the following.

Maté, also known as Chimarrão in Portuguese, is a traditional South American drink popular in Uruguay, Argentina, Paraguay, the southern states of Brazil, southern Chile, and the Bolivian Chaco. Prepared from steeping dried leaves of yerba mate (llex paraguariensis, known in Portuguese as erva mate) in hot water, it produces a sense of wellbeing and increased energy that make it a near perfect choice for a project name from the standpoint of its Argentine developer.

Not saying that "Maté" doesn't present certain difficulties when translated as "Mate" in English, just that understanding the origin of the Spanish/Portuguese word itself is important to keep in mind as this discussion goes forward.

You have just stated one of the biggest reasons NOT to name it Mate. Mate has too much common usage. Apple made a big mistake calling there email program "Mail", there spreadsheet "Numbers" and there Word processor "Pages". It's fairly hard to google those words and get useful information about those applications. Windows, on the other hand, had the power of Microsoft building the brand name for years before Google existed. Now when you google "windows," it's hard to get information about the thing you look out of.

Chimarrao would be bettter name than Mate for gaining "google juice", since the desktop could easily become more referenced, than the drink by that name. However, Chimarrao still suffers from being 4 syllables long, and hard for the non-Spanish speaking people to pronounce.

"Mate being a perfect name from standpoint of its Argentine developer", is a clear example of why big companies don't let the developer give the product it's name, and have a marketing department to do it. Developers give there products names, that are meaningful to them, but don't consider how it helps the product gain marketshare.

[kurt18947]

For me, no. At the end of the day, the design decisions made for the interface in both Unity and Gnome shell mean that too much information is hidden from me when I am working. The global menu is actually a severe hindrance to the way I work and actually slows me down when I am moving between windows.

Working on a laptop means I have no middle mouse, so the default "use middle mouse to open a new window" paradigm is not an option for me, meaning opening a new window if a right-click then a left click with mouse movement inbetween.

What seems to be being missed everywhere in these discussions is that the design decisions in both Unity and Gnome shell are designed around the one-window usage paradigm. You only ever have one window open, and it's maximised. You never need to move quickly to another window. You never need to move between multiple windows quickly. And accessing any information at all about other windows is next to impossible. I often run with 4 or 5 windows laid out across dual monitors in such a way that I can see all their information all at once. If I need to access a programs menu, I click on the menu bar. In Unity however, I first have to give that program focus, then move to the top-left of the visible work area. Now, if the program I want is running in a small window bottom-right, I have to traverse the entire screen real estate to access that window's menu. After giving it focus of course.

I know the new alt-tab functionality in 11.10 is being touted as a big refinement over 11.04 - but why? Why was this functionality degraded in the first place? I used to have two forms of alt-tab: alt-tab between programs on the current workspace, alt-shift-tab between programs on all workspaces (and shift-tab between tabs in a program). So, all of this functionality is *new* in 11.10? But I've been using it for the past 6 releases? Colour me confused.

So no, Gnome shell and Docky don't provide the same level of functionality as I used to get in Gnome2. Even Gnome3 in classic mode doesn't give me the same level of functionality, and I've spent the past day trying to get it working in a form that allows me to work efficiently.

Giving continuing life to the hijack If the window switching means is your primary problem, do you know about tint2? It puts a bar at the botton of the screen of both Unity and Gnome-shell. It's primarily a window switcher as far as i can tell so it may help you. I can see about 17 open windows at one time. It's in the main repository and documentation is easily found via Google. I had problems with auto-hide so turned it off.

[Perberos]

java wat

I already read how to PPA on LunchPad (sorry, It's my humor sense) and I don't want made it as debian style (because I am lazy). so if anyone want to maintain a PPA, welcome!

[vagrale13]

The alacarte doesn' t open to edit menu

:~$ alacarte
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/local/bin/alacarte", line 22, in <module>
    from Alacarte.MainWindow import MainWindow
ImportError: No module named Alacarte.MainWindow

[pinguy]

http://www.zevenos.com/allgemein/goo...2-is-back.html
They have the Mate desktop in their repo

deb http://zevenos.dyndns.org/repo sid main

[Amanas]

I plan on setting up a ppa this weekend. I'll report back once it's up.

[saxonjf]

Let me begin by saying that both Unity and Gnome Shell made me grind my teeth to nubs when I found out that I lost all the easy functionality that Gnome 2 had offered on Ubuntu. Gnome 2 was an excellent bit of software, and deserved better treatment than to be tossed aside like so much garbage. Let me also say that when KDE 4 came out, there was anger, but not to such an extent that forking the old version and maintaining into the future was really viewed as a viable option.

I even tried Fallback, but that was very frustrating itself. The alt-rightclick, the limited functionality. Everythig looked mostly right, but everything felt mostly wrong.

So I have switched over the LXDE, and with some time and effort, I have been able to approximate the look and feel of Gnome 2 in a way which is far more satisfying than even Fallback.

Let me just say that, as an end-user with limited understanding and almost no support in the real world, I will be very excited if Mate is a successful. I am shocked that Ubuntu and Gnome are not listening to their angry users and forging ahead with these frustrating and broken pieces of software with no real options.

Keep it up, Perberos. Don't listen to the naysayers tell you that just going with the flow is the best option. As soon it becomes simple enough for the average idiot end-user to install Mate onto Ubuntu via PPAs or with a DEB, I will do so gladly. can't wait.

[cro]

I plan on setting up a ppa this weekend. I'll report back once it's up.

Well, I was going to ask myself if I could set up a PPA for this, but since Perberos has given his go-ahead to someone else setting up a PPA, and you've kindly volunteered I shall step back

I'll keep posting my efforts at Ubuntu-based configuring and compiling. I have a marginally customised build script/support script now, but given I have almost no experience in the Makefile system whenever I run into a configuration error I have to wait for someone else to fix it.

I am teaching myself the current art around Makefile and configure, but it's been almost 20 years since I last did any real C development (the last time I wrote a C program was in 1994!) so it's slow going, also given I've got a day job

My system is mostly stable, but there are still issues with Caja and some configuration items (that might be caused by the way my system has evolved over the past couple of years, and my ham-fisted hacking about in configuration files)

I'm also going to check out the ZevenOS repo

[cro]

Giving continuing life to the hijack If the window switching means is your primary problem, do you know about tint2? It puts a bar at the botton of the screen of both Unity and Gnome-shell. It's primarily a window switcher as far as i can tell so it may help you. I can see about 17 open windows at one time. It's in the main repository and documentation is easily found via Google. I had problems with auto-hide so turned it off.

I have seen this. I have a customised setup using Cairo Dock at the bottom (auto-hide) for quick access to my most used programs, and the window list at the top of the screen. I've always worked this way (even with MS Windows) so I find the window list at the bottom slightly odd these days Not that I couldn't get used to it though.

The panel itself, the window controls on the left, and the global menu are all non-starters though. The global menu is one of the single most annoying things ever about any OS, and is one of the things I hate most about MacOS (and I wasn't that much of a fan of it on the Amiga or Atari either)

It goes back to what I said before: I don't work in only one program at a time, and the global menu assumes I do.

[cro]

(couldn't figure out how to delete this post)