This article is part of a special 24-day Linux Desktop series. If you’re still missing GNOME 2, the Mate Linux desktop will satisfy your nostalgia.
If you’ve heard this rumor before: When GNOME3 was first released, many GNOME users weren’t ready to give up on GNOME 2. The Mate project (named after the Yerba Mate plant of Yerba Mate) began as a continuation of the GNOME 2 desktop, using GTK 2 (the toolkit GNOME 2 is based on) and then incorporating GTK 3. Linux Mint’s ease of use has made the desktop very popular, and since then it has been widely used on Fedora, Ubuntu, Slackware, Arch, and many other Linux distributions. Today, Mate continues to offer a traditional desktop environment that looks and feels exactly like GNOME 2, using the GTK 3 toolkit.
You can find Mate in your Linux distribution’s repository, or you can download and install a distribution with Mate as the default desktop. Before you do that, however, be aware that many Mate apps are installed with that desktop in order to provide a complete desktop experience. If you’re running different desktops, you may find yourself with redundant applications (two PDF readers, two media players, two file managers, and so on). So if you just want to try out the Mate desktop, you can install a Mate based distribution in a virtual machine (such as GNOME Box).
Mate desktop Tour
The Mate project doesn’t just remind you of GNOME 2; It is GNOME 2. If you were a fan of the Linux desktop in the mid-2000s, at the very least, you’ll get a sense of Mate nostalgia. I’m not a fan of GNOME 2 and prefer to use KDE, but there’s one place I can’t imagine not having GNOME 2: OpenSolaris. The OpenSolaris project didn’t last very long. It was very prominent when Ian Murdock joined Sun before It was absorbed into Oracle, and I was a junior Solaris administrator at the time, Use OpenSolaris to learn more about that Unix style. This is the only platform I’ve ever used GNOME 2 (because I didn’t know how to change the desktop at first and got used to it), and today the OpenIndiana Project is a community continuation of OpenSolaris that uses GNOME 2 through the Mate desktop.
Mate’s layout consists of three menus in the upper-left corner: Apps, Location, and System. The Application menu provides quick access to all application initiators installed on your system. The Location menu provides quick access to commonly used locations, such as home directories, network folders, and so on. The system menu contains global options such as shutdown and sleep. In the upper right corner is a system tray, with a taskbar and a virtual desktop toggle bar at the bottom of the screen.
As desktop design goes, this is a slightly odd configuration. It borrows some of the same things from earlier Linux desktops, MacFinder, and Windows, but creates a unique configuration that is intuitive and somewhat familiar. Mate is determined to keep the model, and that’s what its users love.
Mate and open source
Mate is the most direct example of how open source enables developers to fight the end of a project’s life. In theory, GNOME 2 would be replaced by GNOME 3, but it still exists because a developer built a branch of the code and continued to grow. It’s gaining momentum, more developers are coming on board, and the desktop that users love is better than ever. Not all software gets a second chance, but open source is always a chance or never a chance.
Using and supporting open source means supporting the freedom of users and developers. And the Mate desktop is a testament to their efforts.
Via: opensource.com/article/19/…
By Seth Kenlon, lujun9972
This article is originally compiled by LCTT and released in Linux China