Am I the only one having a Really rough transition?

Support & Help Requests
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#21

Now that you mention it, I have a few problems I’d like some help with.

I upgraded from 16.04 to 18.04.1 (both 64 bit). The upgrade process was very smooth. My computer is a Gigabyte BRIX with an AMD A8-5557M processor, 8 GB RAM and a 1 TB HDD.

First, my computer doesn’t shut down properly. Whether I start the shut down from the System menu or the shut down icon on the menu bar, my computer always does a restart. I need to physically hold down the on-off button during the reboot to shut down.

The second really annoying thing is when I try to rename files in Caja. After I select rename, the filenames are obscured, like they are displayed twice but off register making it impossible to edit the filenames.

These are my main problems.

Jerry

#22

I totally agree re: Disks Utility. Having said that, even under macOS the current Disk Utility is complete garbage in comparison to the Disk Utility of the past. It seems that with every release they strip out a little more functionality.

I don’t understand why Gnome Disks can’t include RAID functionality via MDADM and include benchmarking functionality that doesn’t have the potential to result in data loss and that can work on the OS boot drive.

It would also be nice to have a GTK based Disk Utility.

1 Like
#23

fcitx is this, a text input system primarily for Asian languages. If you only write in Latin-based languages like English, Spanish, French, German, etc. and don’t write in Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or other non-Latin languages, you won’t need it.

#24

On the shut down behavior, several of my systems have BIOS options which control what happens if power fails, or if the system should reboot immediately after shut down.

On Caja, I have noticed that the first part of the filename is highlighted after selecting rename. On my (dark) theme, that puts the background in dark grey, normal text in light grey, and the highlighted area with green background and white text. This is exactly the color scheme used by other applications. Have you looked at theme settings, or is Caja behaving differently for you than, say, Pluma? For me highlighted text is the same in all windows.

#25

Thank you. fcitx is going away. (Revision: it is not installed. Guess that’s why I hadn’t noticed particular stability problems overall )

#26

Actually, there is. The MATE developers should have just done what they did when they created MATE itself, and stayed with the original source code tree from the earlier release, and dealt with any library back-porting issues .

I KNOW that this could have been done, because when mate 16.04 first came out, I found the dumbed-down disk utility so annoying that I removed it and installed the Ubuntu 12.04 version. This wasn’t easy, because I had to deal with a slew of missing dependency issues by installing a ton of other crap.

Specifically, I installed the following official Ubuntu 12.04 packages from the archives:

gnome-disk-utility_3.0.2-2ubuntu7_amd64.deb
libgdu0_3.0.2-2ubuntu7_amd64.deb
libgdu-gtk0_3.0.2-2ubuntu7_amd64.deb
liblaunchpad-integration-3.0-1_0.1.56_amd64.deb
libparted0debian1_2.3-8ubuntu5_amd64.deb
libudev0_175-0ubuntu9_amd64.deb
udisks_1.0.4-5ubuntu2.2_amd64.deb

This was several months back on my 16.04 install - so not sure this will even work with the current MATE releases, but it DID RUN and worked quit nicely including all those nice missing features like tracking USB device connection speed.

Wonder if someone could deal with any security backporting issues and package all this up as a snappy package for MATE? I am sure it would be greatly appreciated.

And while we are on the topic of ‘newer is not necessarily better’ I am also still running the gcalctool 5.28 calculator from all the way back in the 10.04 Lucid release because it has direct formula entry with cut and paste and backspace, and arbitrary precision math with up to 99 digits accuracy and a ton of other features lacking on the current version.

This more powerful older version of gcalctool doesn’t overwrite any of your other installed calculator options and will work seamlessly alongside the supplied “Galculator” in MATE 16.04 and the new “Mate-Calculator” in MATE 18.04.

To install the classic version of gcalctool 5.28, grab these debs from canonical archives:

liblaunchpad-integration-common_0.1.56.1_all.deb

liblaunchpad-integration1_0.1.56.1_amd64.deb

gcalctool_5.30.0.is.5.28.2-0ubuntu3_amd64.deb

Note: for security, the above debs are direct https secure downloads from the Canonical Launchpad source code pages.

Although no longer officially supported, this version of the gcalctool calculator has modest GTK2 dependencies which are all met by currently available standard packages from 16.04 and 18.04, with the minor exception of the two small launchpad-integration libs which provided the app with links providing launchpad source info. These libraries are from the Ubuntu Precise release, but are no longer used by default in Ubuntu and don’t conflict with any current libraries.

I was even able to compile a new ARM version of gcalctool 5.28 from source and create a deb to install on my Raspberry Pi and ASUS Tinker Board - and it works just great.

This classic version of gcalctool has a fairly basic GTK2 look and feel, and as a result isn’t as “pretty” as Galculator and the more recent Gcalctool versions, but if you are a scientist or engineer, you will find that this older version has a LOT more ‘under the hood’ while remaining really easy to use.

2 Likes
#27

I have often thought that MATE should have all their own apps and quit using Gnome apps altogether however there currently are not enough developers that I am aware of to do it, so I guess it would be up to those of the community to make them, on the idea of MATE disks I think adding partition creation and movement would be useful in addition to the capabilities of gnome disks plus whatever the old gnome disks had,

1 Like
#28

Thanks, Charles.

Shut down worked perfectly for two years with Ubuntu 16.04 and Mint Mate before that. I’ll look into my BIOS.

I’ll check other apps to see if I have similar problems with highlighted text and check other themes.

#29

I changed to another theme and Caja Rename looks normal. Thanks!

#30

After today’s software update, my shut down process works properly.

1 Like
#31

Panel crashes when dropbox is installed in my experience. Both versions 16 and 18. No problems with the fresh install of 18 since I haven’t installed dropbox. But that does mean I actually very rarely use Mate any more because the panel crash is consistent and annoying. This is almost definitely an applet defect.

#32

No you are not. 18.04 has been not good for me as well on a number of fronts. I honestly don’t know whether they are due to the Ubuntu Mate implementation of Ubuntu, the Mate Desktop itself or the underlying Ubuntu distro.

1 Like
#33

thankfully I have not experienced any of these issues with Debian Mate.
on various machines I use, as daily drivers:
Stretch (stable) Mate
Stretch Mate with proposed-updates
Buster (testing) Mate
and lastly Buster/Sid (unstable) Mate
so, eliminating both Debian and Mate…
it seems it must be something that is within the Ubuntu recipe … it is a mix of the above together with the inhouse modifications.

2 Likes
#34

I don’t believe it’s the underlying Ubuntu distro. I have Ubuntu 18.04.1 vanilla running on one machine with no issues.

#35

I too have found Debian to be more stable… than many distributions.

#36

I have a Gateway laptop with 1GB of RAM, about 970MB available after the display has used some up.

Under 16.04, after logging in about 560MB was used up, leaving enough for running programs.

Under the live DVD 18.04, that shoots up to about 880MB. Even running a few small programs and exiting shoves stuff into the swap space.

I don’t think I will be upgrading this machine.

#37

I am currently running LMDE3 (basically Debian with a few Mint bells and whistles included) in a VM, which comes with Mint’s Cinnamon desktop out of the box. I have then installed Mate desktop over the top and am currently logged in on the Mate desktop. It’s running significantly faster than UM 18.04 in terms of load up times for various apps and, so far, very stable. Also, a lot lighter on the RAM

1 Like
#38

Yeah, still fighting bugs, finally worked around the udevd taking 100%. Installing a 4.15 kernel just breaks everything.

  1. Docking station not recognized
  2. No wifi
  3. Nouveau display driver not working correctly
  4. Monitor not recognized
  5. Dropping into sleep mode after login
  6. No display at all after waking from sleep.

A real ‘quality’ experience :innocent: