Apologies to everyone for getting too much off-topic. I will stop after this. On 03/07/2018 06:23 PM, Liam Proven wrote:
No, the main reason for the fork was that lots of people simply didn't like the UI design in GNOME3 which was radically different than GNOME2 was.
As I said: _one_ reason. Not the main reason, no.
Well, ok.
It was only later when GNOME3 added a classic mode to address this issue but it was already too late.
GNOME 3 has had at least 2 different modes to look like the previous release.
Fallback Mode:
https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/gnome-3-fallback.html
This was a very close approximation of GNOME 2, with the same menus, panels, icons etc.
Later there was Classic Mode:
https://www.systutorials.com/4611/how-to-enable-gnome-classic-mode-in-fedora...
This is more of a hybrid of GNOME Shell and GNOME 2 -- it's the normal GNOME Shell top panel, but with a bottom panel bolted on.
Yes, I am aware of these. I used to use GNOME3 from very early on. The fallback mode was made available quite early and wasn't meant to be a GNOME2 replacement. It was rather designed to be a fallback when your hardware wasn't powerful enough for GPU-accelerated GNOME3, hence the name "fallback mode".
Indeed. And KDE3/Trinity aren't. Btw, it's called "Mate", named after the popular South American tea as guy who forked it comes from Argentina (if I remember correctly) ;).
This is correct and the Argentinians spell the tea "mate", but it's not pronounced like the English word "mate" -- it's mah-tay. So in English it's often spelled maté to distinguish it from the word meaning "friend" or "pal". And since it doesn't stand for anything, putting it in all-caps irritates me.
The MATE project themselves spells it in all-caps:
Btw, I used to be part of the MATE team, both in Debian and upstream. You will still see all MATE packages in Debian associated with my name.
Ugh, what Linux Mint does is just accumulating a large number of bad forks of unmaintained software.
Speaking as someone who once based a fairly substantial project off it, I found it very useful and the team helpful and cooperative.
No, not really. Speaking as a Debian Developer, lots of their packages outright violate the Debian Policy. I have had arguments with Linux Mint folks over that and I learned that they aren't really interested in adhering to certain software quality standards. Linux Mint is the very definition of a FrankenDebian:
https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian#Don.27t_make_a_FrankenDebian
They are wildly mixing repositories instead of importing the source packages and rebuilding everything in their own environment. That's what Ubuntu does. This is why Linux Mint's graphical updater keeps certain package updates back as they know those could cause issues with APT and result in the package installation state becoming broken. On both Debian stable and Ubuntu release, no updates are ever hold back as updates are guaranteed to not break APT.
They were a major supporter and booster of Maté in its early days, and indeed have made Ubuntu a bit more usable for less-technical folk for a long time.
MATE. See the project's homepage. And, no, they weren't really a booster. The project originated in ArchLinux and at some point MATE people asked me and another Debian Developer to get MATE packaged in Debian which we did. I lost interest at some point though when theming got constantly broken in Debian unstable due to GTK3's theme engine constantly changing and users kept flooding the Debian bug tracker complaining about this and other constant breakages.
I must confess that I do feel that the "traditional" (i.e. Win9x-like) Gtk-based desktop landscape is getting rather crowded now, with Xfce, Maté and Cinnamon. LXDE migrating over to the Qt side broadens that landscape a little, so that's good.
But hey, they're all useful, they all have fans.
And some of them are most likely going to die when the community switches to Wayland unless they manage the jump.
This should reduce the size of all the projects and the amount of duplicated code.
Not really. It just adds another collection of forks of forks.
The Xapps initiative is a great idea. At the very least, Maté and Cinnamon could share them -- I really dislike the "client-side-decorations" menubar-less GNOME 3 apps, which I find significantly less usable than their more conventional ancestors. Xfce could usefully adopt several of them, too. More code-sharing between desktops is a *good* thing.
It might have been a good idea. But the implementation was horrible.
They created "xed" (previously named "xedit", completely ignoring the name clash with the classic X11 application) as a fork of Pluma which is a fork of GEdit for GNOME2.
I use it daily under Xfce. Its proper menu-bar-and-tool-bar UI is more useful and usable to me than the cut-down broken UI that current Gedit has.
I don't consider GEdit as a good reference. I'm a KDE user these days and Emacs is still my editor of choice. I don't need a GUI for writing code.
It's a huge mess, to be honest. And even for MATE the future is at risk when the switch from X11 to Wayland happens.
It was generally held at GUADEC 2016 that the reason that everyone was switching to Gtk3 was to get Wayland support.
You still need to add Wayland support to the underlying window manager which is something that is quite a bit of work. Hence, the MATE folks decided to take the Mir detour:
This post is by Martin Wimpress who is one of the main MATE developers these days.
They are trying to workaround this issue with the help of Mir, but I am very skeptical.
I know of no such efforts... Do tell?
See above. It was on various news sites like Phoronix.
There are no such opportunities for Trinity, unfortunately.
Well, Trinity is Qt. The applications above are GTK.
Yes, that was my point.
And?
You wouldn't be saving any code duplication anyway. The moment you install KDE, you pull in a large number of Qt-based library packages anyway and the moment you install any of those Mint X-apps, you will pull in half of a GNOME stack.
Yes, I know. That too was my point. LXQt might mean a choice of lighter-weight Qt accessories, at least.
Have you tried KDE5 recently? It's not really heavy-weight. It's much lighter than KDE4. The default installation of KDE5 on openSUSE TW is rock-solid, snappy and a very polished product. It's a huge improvement over previous KDE versions and I am saying that as someone who started with KDE 1.0 in 1998 ;).
Which is the reason KDE3 was removed from most distributions.
I thought it was rather simpler than that: that KDE 4 replaced it, and KDE 5 in time replaced KDE 4.
Debian used to have Qt3 and Qt4 packaged at the same time and they do have Qt4 and Qt5 now packaged at the same time with the goal to phase out Qt4 support. Packaging Qt is a rather large effort these days which is why you want to keep the number of different versions in your distribution as low as possible with preferably only one version packaged. Unfortunately, there are still quite a number of applications which haven't been ported from Qt4 to Qt5 so Qt4 is still part of most distributions, although porting from Qt4 to Qt5 is usually much easier as compared to porting from Qt3 to Qt4. My own Qt4 application was ported to Qt5 within a few minutes. Either way, the main reason why KDE3 was kicked out of most distributions was the end of maintenance and hence removal of Qt3 and the fact that KDE3 was eventually dead upstream. Adrian -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse-factory+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse-factory+owner@opensuse.org