MATE Blog

> Is there a WM out there that can do the basic quality-of-life functions of today's DEs? I'd love a simple, opinionated WM that takes the features we know are useful today (workspaces, expo mode, sensible file manager layouts, system trays) and gives them a color-adjustable window theme inspired by 90's aesthetics, with minimal compositing that can run fast on hardware as minimal as a prototype RISC-V board. Or really, what we need is a truly minimal DE. Something that doesn't care about GTK or Qt or Kvantum, and stays lean.

Mate desktop environment in my opinion comes closest to the simplicity of the Windows 95/GNOME 2 environments of the old: https://mate-desktop.org/.

Not sure how hardware-frugal it is since maintaining it under GTK 2 was not feasible and it's now developed against GTK 3 (with still maintaining the look and feel of GNOME 2).

Look instead at MATE's homepage: https://mate-desktop.org/ Or their screenshots. For Ubuntu MATE, select "Traditional" in your link's step 1. You can also look at the final screenshot of https://learnubuntumate.weebly.com/traditional-menu.html

Sure, MATE has evolved to give more options, and distros seem to like defaulting its look to something non-traditional, but the traditional look is still very GNOME2 and very much alive. I've got an old desktop from 2009 that's run Gentoo the whole time , I never upgraded to GNOME3, but I did switch to MATE when it came out, and haven't had to mess with it since apart from trying out different icon sets or other small theme changes. It looks basically the same as ever, even compared to my old laptop screenshots from 2007 -- I still have my wobbly windows from Compiz (fka Beryl) too.

This is off-topic, but IMO the biggest failure of GNOME 3 is that it called itself GNOME 3. Sure it was mostly the same community working on a similar project. But they could have used a new name, and made it a separate offering! GNOME2 had basically completed its mission. It was stable and consistent and had many happy users. But when a "GNOME 3" exists, people are force-upgraded. Except it feels more like a separate product than an "upgrade".

In fact GNOME 2 lives on but strangely that project had to re-brand itself as MATE: http://mate-desktop.org/.

Gtk2 and GNOME 2 did the same thing to all the happy users of GNOME1/Gtk1.2. It was a community upheaval with big consequences.

I think your Gtk2/Gtk3 gripe is the same. If the goals are different enough, let's please let the projects live happily in parallel.

GNOME 2 was perfect. I use the spiritual sucessor MATE wherever it’s possible. It’s not perfect and arguably “boring” but there is really something to it https://mate-desktop.org/

On a side note a similar project exist for KDE 3. Trinity Desktop https://www.trinitydesktop.org/

And on a second mildly related side note: /r/linux had a thread about a modern (2009) OpenSuse spin with KDE 2 a few months ago. It was released as an april’s fools joke but the ISO file totally disappeared from the internet. Or at least the sub couldn’t find it (and the archive.org mirror is corrupted) https://blogs.kde.org/2009/04/01/new-kde-live-cd-release-brings-back-desktop-functionality Maybe someone here have it? :)

I don't know if you are DE shopping, but I've been very happy for the past few years with the MATE Desktop Environment, which "...is the continuation of GNOME 2. It provides an intuitive and attractive desktop environment using traditional metaphors for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems."

https://mate-desktop.org/

Among a great number of things I really like, I will mention that Caja, the MATE version of GNOME 2's Nautilus file manager, can still be switched to spatial mode.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spatial_file_manager

Generally speaking, I too really liked GNOME 2.32 and its predecessors, and, as far as I'm concerned, MATE is as it describes itself.

EDIT: Wording mistake.

These days, I am really impressed by the MATE desktop environment:

https://mate-desktop.org/

It does the stuff that you need without excess weight, the look and feel is flexible enough that you can make it look like other systems if you prefer, and the small development team consistently put out new releases to fix and refine it without any drama.

AWS use it for their Linux cloud-based desktop service, probably for these reasons.

Ubuntu MATE is a great showcase for what can be done with MATE. It's arguably more user-friendly than the main Ubuntu, with the MATE desktop and quick-start features like a well-curated software selector.

https://ubuntu-mate.org/