>https://news.itsfoss.com/ubuntu-mate-24-04/
The development of the MATE desktop environment has come to a halt in the past year, and distro maintainers from not only Linux Mint but other distros that offer MATE are worried that it is not going to be around for much longer.
MATE's chief maintainer and flagship distro, Ubuntu MATE, has removed several features from it's latest 24.04 LTS release such as the software boutique, the welcome app, and are using a version of MATE that is nearing a year old (1.26). The maintainer for Ubuntu MATE has been focusing more on NixOS development than working on the desktop or the ubuntu spin. Linux Mint maintainers have also claimed there has been some friction between them and the MATE development team, and that MATE is now considered to be on life-support.
Where will you be when GNOME 2 finally breathes it's last breath?
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it was inevitable, at least we had a good 10+ years run
This is a likely outcome for not only MATE but every other GTK based desktop environment other than GNOME. GNOME's hard push for GTK4 and libadwaita integration has been destroying compatibility of newer applications on these alternative GTK based desktops. Linux Mint's team has even put forward that they will be maintaining previous GTK3 versions of popular applications that have moved onto libadwaita, simply because of the restrictions put in place by GNOME.
>https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=4675
This is a bandaid solution for now, but I dont believe Mint has the development power to maintain GTK3 on their own. The future of GTK based desktops are to either integrate with GNOME entirely, or rebase onto Qt, like LXDE did. GNOME is single handedly destroying 25 years worth of desktop development
The Mint lads also have Cinnamon to support, don't they? And Cinnamon is GTK-based, so even if they don't want to move to GTK4 they'll have to continue supporting GTK3. Maybe make a fork based on it that moves away from GNOME's bullshit?
I fricking hate Qt, please don't let that become the new standard.
forking and maintaining GTK is not easy.
Mostly because GTK is shit.
They should have forked GTK2 when they had the chance so they didnt. GTK desktops are cucked. Your alternative is just Enlightenment since you dont like Qt.
>fork/maintain GTK3
They can just port their stack to GTK4 when they feel like it without using Libadwaita. The reason Mint devs want to fork more GNOME apps is because they have adopted Libadwaita and no longer can be themed with ease like other GTK apps.
are you seriously telling me that a soiboy famous for "what is the use case of Gnome" is also destroying half of Linux DEs? What even is the use case of his life?
>What even is the use case of his life?
force the linux ecosystem into a corporate duopoly of KDE and GNOME. Independent, hobby-based desktop environments shall not survive (long term plans are for hobby applications to die off too).
>duopoly
You forgot about Cosmic
I hope COSMIC gets ported to other distros quickly. It makes footgays seethe, so I will be supporting it even if it turns out to be a meme like Budgie.
This could help smaller DEs long term if they align themselves under it. Mint's Xapps project could be ported over if iced enables enough theming support. Should be better than maintaining GTK3 forever.
ummm sweaty sway works just fine
>Independent, hobby-based desktop
KDE is independent
GNOME poeple had audacity to call out system76 for not contributing to the ""upstream"" while they eat away and lock down their GTK ecosystem like how systemd locked and ate down shitton of userspace and init-time utilitites. both are heavily associated with redhad and RHs intetntins seem preety clear. they sabotage important linux roject by either buying people in influential projects off or by putting RH puppets in decision making roles.
Red Hat found a pretty cool workaround for GPL. make the code open source but make sure thats its fricking pain in the ass for anyone else but their own ecosystem to use or port. they currently have total control over linux. its already too late.
>Red Hat found a pretty cool workaround for GPL. make the code open source but make sure thats its fricking pain in the ass for anyone else but their own ecosystem to use or port. they currently have total control
This is nothing new and is not exclusive to GPL or Red Hat. See also:
>Microsoft's OOXML
>Google's (WHATWG) Web browser APIs
Having your own people set "open" standards while everyone else eternally and desperately plays catch up is a time-tested strategy at this point.
>GNOME's hard push for GTK4 and libadwaita integration has been destroying compatibility of newer applications on these alternative GTK based desktops.
Blame upstream projects for giving into the bullying. None of this would be a problem if they only targeted mature Ubuntu/RHEL builds and told ebussy and Arch updooters to frick off. https://stopthemingmy.app
>https://stopthemingmy.app
Thanks, adding to my no-hire list https://github.com/do-not-theme/do-not-theme.github.io/graphs/contributors
>baaahhh please use our toolkit
>waaaahh please don't make us use your toolkit
what a bunch of whiny homosexuals
lmao, this is absolute bullshit nonsense.
GTK4 is completely separate from libadwaita and you can use it just fine to build apps that don't follow the Gnome design guidelines.
Heck the only reason libadwaita was created was to not let the gnome design guidelines affect GTK4 and let GTK4 be a desktop agnostic GUI library that is not tied to the gnome design guidelines.
if you are not making a gnome application. don't use libadwaita. libadwaita was made specifically to ease the building of Gnome applications. it builds on top of GTK4 and doesn't affect GTK4 whatsoever. it just uses GTK4 to build more widgets and patterns to fit the gnome UX/UI guidelines.
GTK4 by itself literally looks the same as GTK3 with very small API changes which makes working with it less of a pain. it also makes it easier to make custom widgets.
if you are not gnome. literally just don't use adwaita and use GTK4 and stop sperging out.
No.
saying no means nothing
mention one way in which libadwaita affects GTK4
and btw, kde has the same shit. it's called kirigami and it's built on top of qtquick
>Heck the only reason libadwaita was created
its a fork of libhandy which was made by the Librem devs (I think) . Imagine that the only thing worth shit about gtk4 is made by someone other than gnome they just took it, forked it and slapped a name on it. Then they went and fricked up scrolling for gtk4 wonder when they will fix that or the blurry fonts.
>the blurry fonts.
pangogays hate you and want you to suffer with blurry fonts so they killed bitmap font support everywhere they could
I hate them too. I want my crispy Tahoma, goddammit
gtk4 has thick black borders on all the menu thingies that gnome wont fix
its also feels slower and sometimes has blurry text
that all i know
This sucks for people who still want to LARP as using GNOME 2 even in a GTK 3 world where it doesn't look right but it's hard to see this overall as a majorly bad thing for Linux. MATE focused too much on preserving GNOME 2 as it was, Cinnamon started from GNOME 2 and continuously improved it, and way more people use Cinnamon compared to MATE compared to in the past. Also MATE has the highest end-to-end input latency by like a factor of 5. Out with a wimper.
Don't underestimate the Mint team's ability to maintain shit on their own. They've been adopting projects faster than KDE and are doing completely fine.
>people who still want to LARP as using GNOME 2 even in a GTK 3 world where it doesn't look right
I think MATE looks like a decent operating system. Pretty much all other DEs look like nu-design cancer soiware. I don't care about the underlying technologies as long as they work (so shit like Wayland is out of the question obviously). If it ain't broken, don't fix it.
If they just made modern DEs soulful looking and lightweight, this wouldn't be such a pressing issue.
I didn't mean design sensibilities as much as what it was supposed to look like vs what it looks like now. When distros started yoinking GTK 2 from their repos, Cinnamon was the only GNOME fork to put in the effort to keep their appearance consistent. MATE and Xfce now look weird and inconsistent like Windows even if you do your best to theme them, but it wasn't always so.
I'm not extremely familiar with the way these GTK things work, but I don't find inconsistencies in Mate to be an issue. When I tried xfce, the inconsistencies felt much worse. Anyway, I'll take some windows looking funny over all the windows looking like some cheap ipad/windows 11 mix.
Ironically, if you want to preserve a consistent GTK2 looking interface the best way to go is to use qt5 programs with QT_QPA_PLATFORMTHEME=gtk2
I don't use it but it was really good, what a shame.
Why doesn't Mint switch to Qt6?
I already switched from LXDE to LXQt because of GTK3. GTK3 apps look like shit on Xorg because they intentionally cap the frame rate at 60fps even on faster monitors. I'd rather use Qt than Wayland.
Okay. So all the other DEs that all use GTK need to hand together to save GTK from the GNOME team. I said years ago that GNOME was going to frick everything up for everybody else since they own GTK and the GNOME guys are all buttholes.
>MATE is now considered to be on life-support
>not only Linux Mint but other distros that offer MATE are worried that it is not going to be around for much longer
This is nothing but unfunded GNUMALE FUD.
great, now i have to also use linux abandonware
hopefully it will be easier than windows 7
I'm concerned. I don't use the Mate desktop itself, I use XFCE. But I do use some of the Mate apps, like the search tool, the calculator, the image viewer, the pdf reader, and the archiver tool... It'd suck if those disappear.
But that said, the search tool is kind of shit, I could make my own search tool in Tcl/Tk that would probably be better.
As for the calculator, I can just use a terminal window with tclsh running and use 'expr' to do calculations, and for pdfs, I can use the KDE pdf reader instead, it's pretty good.. The image viewer is the maybe the main thing I would miss..
Oh yeah... the archiver tool, engrampa..... I would miss that..
Is xfce standing strong? If they kill the rat it's fricking over...
yes, they're even working on Wayland support which is a good indicator that Xue will STAY STAY STAY
MATE 1.28 just released though? It was like last month.
MATE already has a Wayland session, so if MATE is dead, Xfce is even more dead.
Mate doesn't support Wayland yet
https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-wayland-session
Not in stable yet
As opposed to xfeces wayland implementation not even being in testing, frickface. I know this is the rat fanatic from yesterday, keep bashing MATE, you are only digging your own grave.
stop reading itsFOSS?
Yes mate is still in development.
all components are now wayland compatible and are working on moving build systems to meson too
https://wiki.mate-desktop.org/developers-corner/wayland-meson/
They haven't made a blog post in 2 years which is bad but its not dead
good post. stops people waisting time on bait thread.
very good desktop btw. mate alts are better than gnome in cases as well.
Would anyone be interested in helping build a totally new desktop environment in Tcl/Tk?
We'd make the basic set of utilities needed:
- Panels, window manager, etc
- file manager
- text editor
- archive browser and extractor
- image viewer
- calculator
- MS Paint clone
- etc.
All written in pure Tcl. Well, we might need C extensions to write a window manager in Tcl. But otherwise pure Tcl.
Is anyone up for it?
I've already got one useful utility prepared, a file system space usage analysis tool. It's a bit like "baobab" from gnome except faster and it doesn't drag in 5 gigabytes of shitty dependencies and "libadwaita"
This looks hideous bro
Where's the STYLE
What's the usecase for so called "style"?
id rather use half baked shit that looks like this instead of gnome "adwaita" bullshit
hideous? it looks functional. If you were in charge you put makeup all over it and bloat it to Hell.
>it looks functional.
No one with a DE that looks like that is doing any useful work with it.
> fricking burger menu and fat buttons on 90s UI with no style
It's like you took the worst parts of gnome and 90s UI.
Honestly at this point I would say why don't you fork the serenity UI toolkit and spin it off from there?
If you are to resort to tcl might as well contribute to GNUstep
god i love windowmaker and GNUstep
>GNUstep
>go to their site
>"Attractive applications"
>this
lol
lmao, even
Hey I never said it's in anyway shiny, I told
ObjC is a step up from tcl and it had like half of those utilities done
unfortunately all gnustep dev activity died in 2014 after apple announced swift
They should just work with Cinnamon's XApp project to port all Mate utilities worth saving like Engrampa or Pluma then move on. Caja is going to be a bit of a sentimental loss but now Thunar supports split views so i guess that also could be folded. Albeit honestly, ideally they would just ditch Nemo and use Caja instead. Caja is a lot snappier.
This looks like a cobbled together clone of this
https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE
I wrote a filepicker in tkinter (wrapper around tcl/tk) and it has some performance and style shortcomings because of that. Not sure I'd trust it with a DE.
What we really need is more rust/iced development. GTK can be deprecated now that its language is deprecated.
>now that its language is deprecated.
What?
C is deprecated, and with it, GTK
>C is deprecated
make a usable fast frontend for tmsu when u save a file and u won't need a file picker
god I hate Tcl. Props to you for actually building something with it though. It looks good btw
>Tcl/Tk
That's even worse than GTK. There is no way I'm touching that.
it very ugly though.
can opengl drawn stuff on screen?
do all cpus and gpus support opengl?
why is there no simple opengl based stuff out there?
i do not know much about these things.
I'm Interested. Where do I sign up?
There are already xlib bindings in Tcl. Writing a Window manager should be easy.
This!
What's the point of MATE when it's just xfce but worse?
MATE has way better apps than Xfce, which is why even Xubuntu uses some of them.
Thunar is trash compared to Caja or any other file manager really.
I wonder what the Serenity OS Main Dev is going to use once this is gone.
Oh god please no, this is literally the only Linux DE that I actually like 🙁
OP is bullshitting everyone. MATE's latest release was 2 months ago (https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-desktop/releases), and the devs have been focusing on supporting Wayland.
OP, probably Ebussy himself, claims MATE is dead because the main maintainer of the MATE flavor of Ubuntu likes NixOS more and isn't paying enough attention to Ubuntu MATE. That's all.
>devs have been focusing on supporting Wayland.
That's even worse than letting it die.
Like it or not, Wayland is the future.
At least there is near constant improvement.
I remember how shit the first releases were.
>Wayland is the future
Even so, I'm still using X11.
Yeah, so am I for now, at least at home.
I don't game at work, so Wayland is fine there.
>At least there is near constant improvement.
Oh yeah so they reinvented something that's worse than what they had, and it still is, but it's better because it is improving. This is some discord furry hugbox tier logic here.
Are you completely unfamiliar with software development? It's always been like this.
Damn near everything is shit and worse than what's it's "replacing" for a while.
>and the devs have been focusing on supporting Wayland.
OH NO NO NO AHAHAHAHA
OP is right after all, it's over.
I'm honestly shocked it even lasted as long as it did. I saw MATE as more of a stopgap DE for people who knew GNOME 3.x was a trainwreck but didn't want to switch to Xfce.
I'm honestly surprised how long it lasted, considering how much of a trainwreck gtk is. I would be very sad if mate gets discontinued, it's one of the only DE's that can make my shitty dell 330 still feel smooth.
I have a Dell studio 1737 c2d 6600, 4 GB ddr2 RAM that runs quick and handles a dozen firefox tabs (as long as only 2 are youtube, but who uses browser yt when freetube blah blah blah...)
With
>bodhi Linux
I have 6. there are newer versions. Memory idles around 330MB
MATE was never good. Unstable piece of shit. Once they ported to GTK3, it was over.
>Linux Mint maintainers have also claimed there has been some friction between them and the MATE development team, and that MATE is now considered to be on life-support
Good. Maybe the Mint devs will replace the MATE edition with something good like KDE
I swear every time Linux Mint is mentioned there's at least one homosexual begging them to drop everything they've done in the past decade and become another generic KDE distro that nobody would use.
>begging them to drop everything they've done in the past decade
You call having a MATE edition "Everything the Mint devs have done in the past decade"? I'd understand if we were talking about Cinnamon but MATE?
Clem and other LM developers were involved in MATE's development until very recently.
mate is not gnome 2. it's just another gtk3.x abomination.
>One less GTK shit desktop
Good, next should be Cinnamon or XFCE
gnome2 made sense when your display was 4 by 3 or 5 by 4
gnome2 makes 0 sense when ur display is 16 by 9 etc
what are you basing this on? you can kill the second bar and move the window list and such to the first one if wasted height is your concern. I did that back with actual GNOME 2 on Ubuntu
finally some finished software
Qt won.
> The maintainer for Ubuntu MATE has been focusing more on NixOS development than working on the desktop or the ubuntu spin
Imagine abandon best DE and best distro (Ubuntu) in favor of some meme distro for troon sisters. I just can handle it any longer, linux is so dead.
>Where will you be when GNOME 2 finally breathes it's last breath?
If Gnome 2 has a million fans I am one of them
If Gnome 2 has ten fans I am one of them
If Gnome 2 has one fan that one is me
If Gnome 2 has no fans then I am no longer alive
If the entire world is against Gnome 2 then I am against the world
I've used LXQt for 10 years and I'm still a GNOME 2 fan. I just don't see the point in MATE if the underlying graphic framework is a horrible, bloated mess. Kindly compare your memory and CPU footprint on these 3 platforms:
- any distro running current MATE
- Ubuntu 10.04 LTS with GNOME 2
- Fedora 14 with GNOME 2
- FreeBSD 8.0 with GNOME 2
You'll see what I mean. Sadly this enshittification is the fate of all DEs, not just MATE.
Mate scored lower memory usage than XFCE in some recent bench, the issue is the whole system becoming more bloated
ie: Ubuntu 8.04 had a cool boot progress bar that showed real progress, it was later replaced by a more bloated thing that only showed moving dots with some stupid excuse
GNOME chads cant stop winning
>using a version of MATE that is nearing a year old
No, mom, you don't understand - I NEED my UPDOOTS
TCL or Obj-C sound better than GTK's horrible use of Glib/GObject.
https://github.com/iverg/TclObjC
Is it really that difficult?
They took this from you
What do you mean. You can still install it. Duh.
They literally had the most polished KDE4 experience of all distros, why did they drop it again?
According to themselves, it was difficult to integrate their homemade GTK tools and apps in KDE/Qt:
https://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=3418
>KDE is a fantastic environment but it’s also a different world, one which evolves away from us and away from everything we focus on. Their apps, their ecosystem and the QT toolkit which is central there have very little in common with what we’re working on.
>We’re not just shipping releases and distributing upstream software. We’re a product distribution and we see ourselves as a complete desktop operating system. We like to integrate solutions, develop what’s missing, adapt what’s not fitting perfectly, and we do a great deal of that not only around our own Cinnamon desktop environment but also thanks to cross-DE frameworks we put in place to support similar environments, such as MATE and Xfce.
>When we work on tools like Xed, Blueberry, Mintlocale, the Slick Greeter, we’re developing features which benefit these 3 desktops, but unfortunately not KDE.
>Our own mission isn’t to diversify as much as possible in an effort to attract a bigger chunk of the Linux market, and it’s with a bit of sadness that we’re letting this edition go. We focus on things we do well and we love doing to get better and better at doing them. KDE is amazing but it’s not what we want to focus on.
This is all fricking moronic and I'm glad I left those mongoloids, everything they talk about is better accomplished with Qt/KDE, look at them now getting pegged by ebussy and co, on the other hand LXQt is doing great
>LXQt is doing great
lol, lmao. LXQt is proof that DEs based on Qt other than KDE can't work.
Third desktop to get Wayland
Why did they drop the leaf shaped logo for just a circle?
The average 20s tech user craps their pants when forced to see aggressive shapes
Circles are inoffensive, nonjudgemental, safe, motherly.
frick circles.
My desktop has no rounded corners and I use
* {
border-radius: 0px !important;
-webkit-border-radius: 0px !important;
border-top-left-radius: 0px !important;
}
in my Firefox userContent.css.
For me it's Gnome Flashback
The last update was a month ago.
I used MATE for a while after GNOME 2 died, but the persistent problems with screen tearing drove me away. I suppose their inability to fix this for so long caused a bit of an exodus.
This is what awaits all GTK shitty desktops, KDE3.5 is still going strong after 20 years lol
Good
Good, it might be somewhat sad but we need less fragmentation, wish the XFCE, Mate and Cinamon teams would join forces... LxQt can keep doing their own thing.
Literally one look at their GitHub should make you immediately realize that MATE is actively developed.
never moving from GTK 2 or GTK 3 until there's a gtk4-classic like https://github.com/lah7/gtk3-classic
Even if, and I mean IF, Mate development stopped right now, it would still be usable for years to come.
Apparently people need money in order to work. Who woulda thought.