[lug] MATE

[Davide Del Vento]

> I'm very glad you suggested testing other users.
> Thanks!

You are very welcome. Trying as someone else is one of the things I
always do when I get whatever odd problem.

> Incidentally, I did look at MATE as a substitute, and saw mention of gtk2+
> versus gtk3+ compatibility. Looks like Cinnamon is the gtk3+ variant of
> MATE...or at least a similar idea. Have you tried both MATE and Cinnamon? If
> so, what was the reason to pick MATE over Cinnamon?

I did not try Cinnamon. Why?

Background (vaguely mentioned before): I use two monitors (currently
24") and I think I could use more (in fact my new laptop should
support these two monitors plus its own screen, which was too much for
my old one -- however I have some driver issue at the moment). The
laptop is attached to a docking station. I want the laptop to remember
the settings it has seen, without me repeating the same thing over and
over each time I move it around from office, to home, to meeting room
with projector to lap (well it's a laptop :-)
I want it to do automatically pick the last setting I picked for that
particular combination of screens, possibly live (without restarting),
when docked/undocked and moved around (e.g. from office to meeting
room with projector). I use "automatically remember running
applications when logging out" and ideally I want it to remember where
the windows where the last time (i.e. two or three or more reboots
ago, if the number of attached screens has changed since). Computers
that "forget" drive me crazy.
[end of background]

Back in the day, I was happily running Ubuntu LTS with GNOME2 to which
I moved because I grew tired of the too-fast-for-me release cycle of
Fedora (which I was using with GNOME2 too and that was also fine).
Then GNOME3 and Unity came out, and I tried both and I forced myself
to learn them, but eventually it was too annoying (you may find rants
about gnome3 from myself in the archive of this list). I switched to
KDE (on debian sid, IIRC) and that was ok (not great) for a while, but
then the whole install was broken and I had nothing to complain since
I picked the "unstable" version knowing it was unstable. Post-mortem I
understood why it "died" and realized the even will have occurred
again with my workflow (details on request), so I went back to
kubuntu. But KDE there did not work as I wanted and news came about it
losing its official status, so I gave up on that. I tried a few other
things as distro and window system such as XFCE and awesome, but they
lacked some "basic features" (basic for me, clearly other users use
them and are happy, so...) and they lasted only a day or two.

So I clearly felt being stuck in http://www.xkcd.com/1579/ (which
Randal had not published yet) and considered running an unsupported,
outdated version of the Ubuntu LTS in a VirtualMachine. That would
have been complicate (or maybe impossible), especially at work, for
security reasons.

As soon as I learned about MATE, I tried it and never looked back.
FWIW, I use it under LMDE (I'm just installing v2, since v1 will be
out of support in January). I see no reasons for trying anything else.
MATE works almost perfectly for what I need. It remembers screens that
is has seen, it works decently (but not totally) for the "ideally"
requirements mentioned above. It does not think my double-24" is a
phone and does not try to take functionality away to save three
pixels. It does remember the position of the windows, but only if at
the latest reboot the screen did not change, otherwise the position is
"a guess". Annoying but not deal-breaker.
The only problems I get are about drivers in the rare occasions in
which I get new hardware (like now).

Cheers,
Davide