Some comments on 18.04

Thoughts & Feedback
#1

First, let me start off by saying that this is by far my favorite distribution. MATE is the definition of “beauty in simplicity”. I don’t care about fancy animations or anything like that - I just want a simple, stable, productive DE, which MATE definitely is. Everything seems very refined.

In fact, everything is so refined that my only suggestions for improvement are such nitpicks that I almost didn’t bother posting, but…

It would be nice if:

  • The top panel could be sized below 27 px when the “Menu Bar” applet is present. I run the “Traditional” theme, and on 16.04, the panels were both 24 px. However, in 18.04, it seems like the menu bar is preventing me from setting the size to less than 27 px. If I remove the menu bar, I can set the panel as small as I want. Also, the little MATE/Ubuntu logo next to “Applications” seems to be much smaller in 18.04, which I think is related to the issue.

  • The system shutdown button could be moved to the right of the clock. Or, better yet, the indicator applets could be separated. I did see some discussion about this in one of the threads, so hopefully this happens eventually and gets back-ported to 18.04.

This last one is really a personal preference…

  • The contrast was reduced on the scrollbar in mate-terminal. While it’s definitely an improvement over 16.04’s almost-impossible-to-distinguish scrollbar, it just seems a little too out of place. When I first opened the terminal, I thought there was some rendering issue with my theme or something. It just doesn’t blend very well. I’m not sure if this can even be changed per-program or if it’s some global setting, but on 16.04, it seems like it’s different than other applications.

Regards,
Jake

1 Like
#2

Some suggestions, since I suspect I may be the poster who you saw in those other threads:

  • Panel sizes - no one seems to care. If you were trying to use panel wallpapers try resizing the wallpaper and it will look better. If you just wanted the space back, good luck because as I said no one seems to care. This is something that’s been known since at least 17.10, possibly earlier and nothing has been done about it. It’s simply not a priority.

  • System Shutdown - this one is actually being worked on and will eventually show up according to Wimpy but right now needs some stuff upstream done to make everything work. Have you considered moving the indicators to the right of the panel and the clock to the left? It’s not ideal but it works. Alternately the old shutdown shortcut is still there in the applets collection, you just have to right click and add to panel the shortcut and move it to the end. You can even uninstall the new system indicator if you want to get rid of the new redundancy.

Good luck! If anything changes before the next LTS, definitely ping me because I want to know about it too but for right now workarounds are mostly all that we can do.

#3

Thanks!

I’m willing to contribute some money towards getting the panel size issue fixed if that would help. Perhaps $30 USD? I’m not sure how much the typical bounty is for this sort of thing, but it seems like a relatively easy fix.

The panel size issue annoys me since it works fine in 16.04. I think it falls into the “paper-cut” category.

I tried going on the Bountysource site, but I couldn’t figure out how to actually create a new bounty.

I can just gift the money to someone via Paypal if that works too.