“The team is proud to announce the release of MATE Desktop 1.6. This release is a giant step forward from the 1.4 release. In this release, we have replaced many deprecated packages and libraries with new technologies available in GLib. We have also added a lot of new features to MATE.” Look at those screenshots. This is what GNOME is supposed to be: elegant, understated, to-the-point. I should try this.
Please… Why are there still these conservative people who like the windows 95 desktop still?
The OSX Dock/Ubuntu Launcher concept where running apps and favorite apps are accessed in the same way is much more intuitive. Especially on OSes with good virtual memory management, where leaving a program running for a long time doesnt matter. And computers with SSDs where launching an app is nearly as quick as switching windows to an already running app.
I too am sick of the obsession with Windows 95 being the pinnacle of user interfaces. (yes, Gnome2 and KDE are clones of the Windows95 interface paradigm).
Really is simple, If you look at the age of most Linux users, chances are their first operating system was Windows95. Microsoft reinforced this as all subsequent Windows versions carried on the Windows95 interface (except finally a break with Win7).
So, Windows95 is simply what most people have been trained, or perhaps accustomed to using. Change is fundamentally disruptive, so anything that does not resemble Windows95 is met with resistance.
Originally I disliked Unity as it was buggy, unstable and incomplete, but I finally switched over from Gnome 3.6 and I’m fairly impressed with Unity (in Ubuntu 12.10), just wish Unity Tweak Tool was officially part of the control panel.
Errr… No. My first operating system was Sinclair ZX81 Basic. And what a load of B****cks, where did you think that one up from? I think you will find that most Linux users are middle aged and above, and started with a similar experience or even earlier.
That been said, I have to say I found Win 95’s gui and interface quite familiar when I first used it as it wasn’t that different from Amiga Workbench which I had been using for about 6 years prior to Win 95’s release and with both of them at least you could get work done. With todays crop of desktop extreme flashy edition deluxe, they just get in the way of you doing anything while taking away any user settings to allow you to change the way it looks and works. I for one will not be using Windows 8, Gnome 3, unity or anything else that tries to glue a mobile interface on to my desktop. Then again as has been said before, it’s down to user preference and people should be able to use what they want.
Mate Desktop is one of them that enables that choice and I say good luck to them.
/ end rant
Allthough i agree with you, most linux users are no longer 30+ years old. And it is a fairly good chance they started using computers after 95 was released. Hell, most computerists today have not even used win3.1 at all.
Your personal experience does not make it true for the majority.
Why do you think that “a change” is something that is alien for most Linux users, since most of Linux users made a choice to switch to a whole new operating system?
Besides, I think you need to read the history of User Interface evolution.
They aren’t against change when they choose the change themselves of course.
Care to elaborate?
Now that DOES describe me and it’s something I’ve spent my whole life fighting to overcome.
When I was little, I’d throw a fit over going to the beach because it wasn’t my decision, then throw a fit over coming home because it wasn’t my decision.
My introduction to Vim was delayed by half a decade because I misinterpreted people’s enthusiasm as subtle pressure to try it.
I know I’m resistant to change to a detrimental degree and I’m working on it. However, in this situation, I’ve actually weighed the pros and cons of desktops like GNOME 3, Unity, and KDE 3.
Yes, GNOME 3’s dynamic approach to virtual desktops is great. I’ve wanted to implement that since before GNOME 3 was even announced but couldn’t find a WM where the effort to keep my current comfort zone while adding dynamic desktops was low enough.
Yes, in theory, compositing is superior in every way.
Yes, in theory, I love the idea of AppIndicators.
Yes, I was happier with KDE 3.5’s highly-integrated design.
However, in practice, I value what LXDE gives me more than what it loses me.
I value responsiveness and I’m too used to the high responsiveness of desktops based on LXDE or IceWM or something else designed for older systems.
As much as I’d love compositing to cache window pixmaps and implement alpha blending, in my experience, it produces a small but noticeable slowdown on window-management operations (The easiest way to look for it if you don’t want to verify that it happens in every compositor is to use KDE 4’s Enable/Disable compositing keybinding) and shaped windows do well enough for my needs with things like rounded corners and OSD.
AppIndicators could have been a godsend for making the system harder for buggy applications to break, but I insist that left-click toggle the visibility of the main window and right-click show the context menu.
The AppIndicator API has no means that could even be abused to register a show/hide behaviour for a patched indicator host to assign to left-click, so I force the XEmbed-based tray icon support on programs like Deluge.
I can’t use Trinity because its control panel breaks if you install KDE 4 apps at the same time.
…and KDE 4:
1. made a mess of the Open/Save dialogs I loved so much
2. introduced animations you can’t turn off
3. has a bitrotting Konqueror that’s killed my interest with a thousand papercuts
4. has a file listing widget that, like Firefox but unlike Qt 3 and GTK, has no dead zone for click-and-drag on my high-resolution mouse so I’m constantly getting drags (and possibly “drag into same folder to make a copy” operations) when I mean to click or double-click.
Yes, despite wanting to get work done, I do still love the new and shiny… I’m just not going to accept a drop in productivity to get it.
First, we don’t obsess over the Windows 95 interface as the pinnacle of design interface. We obsess over 98SE as the pinnacle.
It was Windows 98 that brought in “quick launchers.”
No, I started with a Radio Shack CoCo, and moved to the TRS-80. I have used Macs, Atari STs, Amigas, DOS, and Windows 3.1, prior to using Windows 9x. Toss in a few early Macs, and submitting batch jobs via JCL to a mainframe, and I think I have a bit of exposure to computer interfaces.
I would argue that the point and click interfaces have more in common than they have differences. The commonality can be traced to the research arm of Xerox, rather than to Microsoft. Pointing and clicking was a good response to the possibility of using a mouse to move a pointer on screen.
And you highlight some of what I don’t like about Unity, lack of configuration. A similar lack drew me to KDE over Gnome, and later to XFCE.
Worse, though, is Unity’s failure to distinguish launchers from already running programs. That’s something even some of the basic window managers manage.
That failure to distinguish occurs in other areas, such as search engines. Here the problem involves the failure to distinguish local vs. Amazon searches. Canonical crossed an ethical line with that one.
As for Mate, and Gnome 2 before it, it looks nothing like Windows 95, although it uses the same point and click interface (so does Unity, for that matter). Gnome 2 was a sensible, working interface. Its categories made a certain amount of sense. Microsoft never did enforce categories in its Start Menu, consequently it was usually a mess.
OTOH it could take some time to find new app, when unsure to which category it was assigned…
Ever hear of this little thing called preference? Look it up.
“Intuitive” is an over-used buzzword that to me doesn’t mean squat; it has lost its meaning as people seem to just toss the word around in every context possible when talking about computers. Sorry, but there aren’t too many parts of computers that follow the definition of “intuitive”… and that includes graphical user interfaces.
I agree with Intuitive as a bad description. But given the last two points (VM, SSD) in my OP these allow the interface to be less complex because launching an app and switching to an app is the same action.
I really like this because is using a non UI technologies to make the UI more simple. Ie it’s getting the computer to work for you instead of being anal about controlling the state of every app thats running on your desktop.
But there is less and more intuitive, on a spectrum, what he seemed to talk about…
“Newer” doesn’t automatically mean “better”. Unity, Gnome 3 and other new DE/WMs can be slow, buggy and complicated [when it comes to their architecture].
So … some people risk and choose them, others go with the things that ain’t broken and work for them.
I always preferred to use Openbox or XFCE4, just because it’s much simpler/lighter than other DE/WMs. It does everything I need, so why using something else?
I dislike eye-candy. I prefer UIs that don’t come in my way.
Of course, it doesn’t mean I have anything against using KDE, Gnome or other DE/WMs. I just don’t force my choice and my preferrence on others.
That’s what I expect in return. As simple as that.
Please… Why are there still these newbies people who like SmarTV interfaces in his desktop computers still?
Because unlike “people” like yourself, we have something you all basically lack.
It’s called a clue.
To me,^A it looks like the newer generation have traded religion for technology and church for corporation, and some of them are the new Jehova Witness trying to convince everybody that THEIR religion or church is the only one worth pursuing. At least they don’t go door to door, yet…
Congratulations, you’re just as ignorant and prejudicial as the OP.
Going by that logic, any decent tiling window manager + dmenu is going to sh*t all over your “intuitive” desktop environment.
No wonder I run SpectrWM on OS X.
Edited 2013-04-04 12:08 UTC
spectrwm… <3
Unity or GNOME Shell may be more intuitive, I’d be willing to agree to that, but I find the GNOME2/KDE style of interface requires far fewer steps to make things happen. I find Unity in particular easy to navigate, but whenever I use Unity or GNOME Shell it takes twice as many mouse clicks or key strokes to accomplish simple tasks. So while I suspect these newer interfaces are probably easier to learn, they also throw speed bumps in the way. Their reliance on 3-D support also prevents many people from using them. That is why I find myself coming back to MATE and KDE, because they are faster and don’t rely on 3-D video support (a common weak point in most Linux distros).
This has zero to do with “Windows 95” fanboyisms. There are several Desktop Environment paradigms and this is just one of them. A lot of people liked GNOME 2.x, myself included, and a lot of personal and professional environments relied on it. It’s not old, it’s what it is. And the way MATE survived and thrived proves that people still want it. And the MATE developers are doing a superb job by re-architecting the deprecated underpinnings with the current technologies of GNOME 3. That’s a good thing.
More research went into designing that interface than probably anything else on the market. A coalition of Sun, HP, RedHat, and smaller companies made the usability refinements because they wanted to push into government agencies as a viable desktop solution (fascinating insight into the early development of Gnome 2, see: http://www106.pair.com/rhp/free-software-ui.html and https://lwn.net/2001/0614/a/usability-calum.php3).
My theory is that with Sun out of existence and HP reeling, only RedHat has a vested interest in Gnome development. Except now RedHat has completely given up on desktop Linux ever happening and they are more interested in making and keeping a sustainable competitive advantage in the cloud computing/virtualization market, so they threw everything away from Gnome 2.x for something that fits that new paradigm. Correct me if I’m wrong. Its going to be fascinating to see how they milk a usable interface out of Gnome Shell for RHEL7.
Gnome 2 was sensible and flexible as a user interface and that holds true today (still the default in CentOS/RHEL/SL6). Just because something is old doesn’t mean it wasn’t well thought out or useful.
I’m not really sure how they are going to manage it. RHEL 7 is going to be based on Fedora 18, which has GNOME 3.6 (not bad) and also MATE 1.4. I suspected that bringing MATE into Fedora 18 was a key play for RHEL 7, but I’ve been told that GNOME 3 will be the default desktop on it, so I’m a bit confused. I guess sysadmins will have the choice of keeping people on a GNOME 2 interface with RHEL 7, using the official RHEL 7 MATE packages. That is not bad news for enterprise environments.
MATE in Fedora was introduced and continues to be maintained by volunteer developers and have nothing to do with Red Hat or RHEL. Most Fedora packages are maintained by volunteers these days and have nothing to do with Red Hat.
GNOME 3 in large part is developed by the Red Hat desktop team and will end up as default for RHEL 7 with KDE as a alternative as always.
Now EPEL add-on repository might include MATE just like it includes Xfce right now but again, that is a volunteer driven project.
Still, Fedora is being sponsored by Red Hat
I’m not saying that Mate is connected in any way to Red Hat, though. It isn’t. And It’s actually pretty cool, fast, repsonsive and looks nice. I never liked Gnome, but Mate with updated dependencies, themes, etc looks nice.
Elegant? Understated?? Are you serious?? It’s fine if you like it but I’d hardly call gnome 2 elegant or understated. Configurable sure but elegant it is not not.
I understood him to mean the lesser definition of elegant, as a synonym of simple. Which would be redundant with understated but more appropriate than the main definition of elegant: “Stylish and/or graceful in appearance and movement”.
Congrats to the MATE team for another release. This is a project that I very much admire and want to see succeed.
So, there seem to be two different opinions about the future of MATE. Opponents claim that the code base is a pile of rubbish and also based on GTK2, thus being unsustainable and bound to fizzle. Proponents claim that they are working on GTK3 and are keeping the project alive. What do you think about MATE? Does it have a future? Users who *want* something like this will still be abundant for years to come. But will MATE manage to keep it together and active?
It looks dated IMO. Also my biggest gripe with Gnome 2 is still there: not enough padding in the panels. This bugged me to no end when I used it.
I’ve been using computers since DOS 3.3. I spent my formative years on Windows 3.1 and Macintosh System 7.1. That doesn’t change my preferences. (Plus, I run LXDE… not GNOME or MATE. I’m slowly piecing together my own variant of the desktop paradigm which doesn’t quite match ANY of the options out there.)
The Dock/Launcher pushes the desktop further toward the Application-Centric end of the GUI spectrum. I prefer to be closer the Document-Centric end of the GUI spectrum.
Not all of us have the budget to buy every upgrade that would help us and I haven’t had time to get comfortable enough with the SSD market to trust a purchase to not fail at the worst possible time.
LXDE does everything I need, is cheaper than an SSD, and wastes fewer resources elsewhere too… which further speeds things up since less RAM usage means more disk cache.
I used to consider KDE 3.5 the greatest desktop in the world. This is exactly what made me give up on KDE 4 and move to LXDE.
(Among other things, they admitted that Konqueror is on life-supported, bitrotting aside from maintenance patches from the KHTML guys… I used Konqueror 3.x as the world’s greatest tabbed, splittable, general harness for KParts and KIOSlaves. Konqueror 4 has a ton of papercut-class bugs that make it unusable.)
That’s the #1 reason I could never stand Unity. If I already know what I want to do, having the UI second-guess me just increases the friction.
I prefer to have an auto-hide launcher panel full of icons on the right edge of my screen which always opens a new process rather than launching an existing one.
Also, Unity’s approach feels like it’s delegating the reinvention of managing multiple documents to the applications… and I don’t WANT every application to be tabbed. I definitely want some to be, but some I want tiled instead.
Should every application also implement splittable windows? …and the ability to choose whether the split or the tab bar is more top-level?
I suppose it’s all relative, but I wouldn’t say GNOME 2 is configurable. Sure, it’s more configurable than GNOME 3, but that’s like calling Tea “caffeine-free” because it has less caffeine than Coffee. KDE is configurable. Desktops built from scratch using loosely-coupled components and rcfiles are configurable.
I could never get comfortable with GNOME 2 because it lacked certain config tweaks, I was told that not even an “Advanced…” button was un-confusing enough for granny, and they seemed to be hard-coded since they weren’t in the gconf browser either.
Honest question: Is this supposed to be sarcasm?
GNOME 2 disagreed with me on many things, but the one I remember most clearly is how every single theme I tried that wasn’t horrendously ugly had too much padding everywhere. (Conversely, KDE 3.5 had too many eye-searingly glossy/glassy icon themes)
This. It drives me nuts how far modern UIs go in trying to obstruct the file system from the user. Seems to me that it’s an initiative driven by marketing concerns. I believe there was a story posted a while back regarding GNOME 3 developers’ brand-based decision making. Why should a brand have to act as a middle man between me and my content?
More importantly, why would they even want to?
Can we have a working gtk2 network manager applet to go with that please? (0.8.2 no longer works and causes breakage)
I just use WiCD. Network-manager was always a mess in my installations anyway. It’s wird, convoluted, it creates nasty config files, etc