Hello, as an exercise in possibilities, I went looking for all distros that have MATE as the default Desktop Manager. The following is the list I was able to compile, as a first attempt.
Are there others out there that feel that the primary attractant is the Desktop Manager, with the underlying OS being a secondary consideration?
If so, could the pursuit of such a cooperative effort be successful?
If I am completely off base with such a view on Desktop Managers, please "speak freely"!
Thank you for your feedback.
P.S. My next step would be to find like-minded people in those other communities, to help raise the awareness of
need/demand,
with a view to encourage developpers to pursue that "market demand"
Is that a reasonable approach, or should I be resigning myself to the "march of history" and avoid being "trampled" by the behemoths of KDE, Gnome and Xfce!
As a final "last gasp" attempt of salvaging something of MATE, surely to be perceived as heresy, does anyone know enough about the constructs of Cinnamon to say whether it would be possible to "tweak" that to make it behave the way we have come to expect from MATE?
(How's all that as food for thought ... before we make the great leap to futures unknown!)
My focus with the outlined "solicitation" was on the Desktop Manager, aka MATE.
It is my sense that if your preferred interface is MATE, regardless of platform, there must be some sense of shared need/purpose with that Desktop Manager's functionality/evolution.
Not to belittle its importance to each individual, the OS "quirks" are more appropriately deemed, in my view, "background", one step removed from the "daily driving" experience. It's under the hood. When driving, I look at the road and view, I don't open the hood and tinker. That only takes place when I stop driving, and make the effort to tweak/fix/replace using my mechanic's skills. The OS is where I "supercharge" my platform, or put on the "off-road" suspension instead of the "race-track" suspension. It's a different level of methods and capabilities, which don't happen as you're driving. (Sometimes, I may go over the top with analogies, but I think they work! )
Debian offer two different installers, whilst their main installer doesn't offer MATE as a default install option; the live or second installer has offered it for many many releases.
Flavors: The live images come in several "flavors" providing a choice of desktop environments (GNOME, KDE, LXDE, Xfce, Cinnamon and MATE).
Personally the live ISOs have been my preference for some time; as I do prefer calamares to di (Debian installer). Other than a slight difference in setting up sudo (a change I'd make anyway; its what Ubuntu MATE users are accustomed to after all), I'm not aware of any other difference on install.
Just to be clear on my intent with this discussion, I was NOT trying to encourage UM Users to emigrate to those other distros.
I was highlighting the potential size of the MATE diaspora, which could potentially be approached to "form assembly" under a shared banner, such as "MATE Desktop Users SIG" (something akin to PhotoShop Users SIG, or Catia Users SIG, or AutoCAD Users SIG), to see if such a group could enable necessary actions to re-envigourate the MATE Desktop development activities.
I used Debian Mate stable for a while and got tired of being told my software was not up to date. That and the Debian forum which is not helpful if you are not asking advanced users questions (RTFM to new and average users questions ) were the reasons I switched to Ubuntu Mate. Ubuntu Mate is stable but still uses more updated software and this forum is awesome regardless of level of expertise.
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