Ubuntu MATE 19.10 Beta Testing

[mircea]

Just Hear yesterday about this beta release, and it's amazing bunch of fixed issues:

1. the screen tearing is fixed... such amazing, test on one Intel and two Nvidia Video system from live CD (Nuveau / No proprietary Nvidia drivers as is a live CD Image) the issue is completely fixed. Probably I should thank for this fix to @vkareh as I see is doing a lot of good work all over the Mate Desktop, not just only to Marco Compositor.
2. Mate panel configuration this time looks it change nicely.. no more crash or inconsistency, even on first live run from all three systems only one start with consistent panels, the other two, one start with a missing panel and the other with both panels on top... but after change from mate tweak it gets consistent ... so hope only a issue somehow related to live image.
3. Inconsistent size of Icons in Control Center remain as issues for quite a long time, not evaluating the icon size consistency on desktop, probably related and also not fixed.

So as a conclusion solving the tearing on desktop, is the most important one fix in this release.
Mate Desktop is the best Desktop Linux has, and with this release is coming close to high quality and perfection ... hoped also 32bit systems have benefited from this ... but that's it. And also hope my third top issues (with inconsistent control center /desktop icon size) will be addressed some day (as I do not understand how in 16.04 RPI image icons are consistent)

Just wait for upgrade when released and available...

[mircea]

You can address it yourself this issue, not so complex
I mention a fix here

Mate 18.04 - Indicator Applet Complete 1.20.0 - Icons resize issue

I use Ubuntu Mate on several PC and updating to Mate 18.04 bring me an annoying permanent issue. Just to note, I prefer to use Menu Bar, Font, and an desktop element size small, to not waste space used for displaying main apps content. Par example I use on all PC even one with 4K display size on menu bar between 17 and 20 pixels, but on all of this PC the Indicator Applet Complete will not display correctly. it has an padding effect of 2-3pixel on both border edges, witch other icons like C…

[mauron]

Thank you arQon. Sorry I wasn't focused enough and missed that message, indeed MATE Tweak brings back that menu button very easily.

[Fall66]

Ubuntu MATE 19.04 on Virtual Box :

Problem with the control center. I cannot go to the personal infos settings. Control center cannot go down to these settings and is blocked to this level.

[mdooley]

Synaptic Package Manager gives a false error message when removing old kernels.

After closing this message I continue on with the removal which succeeds.
Bug 1846072

[vkareh]

Probably I should thank for this fix to @vkareh as I see is doing a lot of good work all over the Mate Desktop, not just only to Marco Compositor

You're very welcome we have an amazing team of developers and testers, so that helps! And @Wimpy kicks my butt regularly to get things fixed

Inconsistent size of Icons in Control Center remain as issues for quite a long time, not evaluating the icon size consistency on desktop, probably related and also not fixed.

This is a known issue (in the Control Center) and it has been in my To Do list for a while, but life keeps getting in the way. Rest assured that we know about this and will be fixed at some point (maybe in the "paper-cut fixes for the paper-cut release" release )

[vkareh]

@mircea, this only took me a few minutes to fix, so I figured I'd send in a patch. Now icons are uniformly sized and should render more sharply on HiDPI displays (or will be when this thing gets merged, tagged, and released )

icons: Force uniform size on icons

[mircea]

Oaaauuuu, so amazing ... you are my Hero @vkareh ...
Maybe you can return a "favor" to @Wimpy , a small "kick back", and ask him to add this fix to current "paper-cut release" ...
You and Ubuntu Mate team are doing such an amazing things ... so excited to update to this release witch will be available soon...
Oaaauuu....

[gabdub]

I noticed that the LibreOffice's global menu is still duplicating entries.
Is this a LibreOffice issue?

The problem was reported here some time ago...

Global Menu Duplicating Menus

Hello people ! The global menu as you can see in the image is with the duplicate options, this happens only with the libreoffice suite. Ubunbu-Mate 18.10 [Captura%20de%20tela%20em%202019-02-27%2022-29-48]

[trongthanh]

I just notice Marco has hidden shortcuts that are very hard to search and change.

I recently upgraded to 19.10 and switched to use Marco adaptive compositor, I noticed my custom shortcut to create new tab in Tilix is now overridden with opening new MATE Terminal window instead (Super+T). I searched everywhere for the config, in Keyboard shortcuts and in dconf configs, finally found it is deep in /org/mate/marco/global-keybindings/

Can we move these Marco keybindings out to the Keyboard Shortcut window in Control Center where it is easier to discover and modify?

[Daniel_Olsson]

I have a problem with 19.10. And that is when i was trying to change clock to use ntp and a popup said do you want to install ntp? Yes or No. If you press Yes you will get the error that my screenshot is providing.

[Kabuki-kai]

I ran into a problem with the upgrade, but I'm installing it on a flash drive for portability. I don't expect things to always go according to plan because I'm not the standard use case. That said, I did a fresh install, and I noticed a few items.

1. Thunderbird and VLC still display as the default apps on the splash screen during the install. This should be addressed before the final release to avoid a branding issue.

2. I've noticed this on a couple of Ubuntu MATE versions, but the MATE icon on the Mutiny panel does not appear to have the same number of sizing options as the other icons. I like my panel icons to be smaller than the default size. I have to choose 50 pixels, but I would like them to be a little bigger. I have to choose 50 because if I go from 60 (the default) to 59, the MATE icon jumps to ~50, and the other icons barely change. The same thing happens when I go smaller than that. If I change it to 49, the MATE icon reduces significantly, and the other icons barely change.

3. On the Mutiny layout, I have to move the trash bin up slightly to get my cursor into a place where I can right-click on the panel to change the icon size.

4. The Caja file manager is not a default icon on the Mutiny panel layout. (More of a preference than a bug, I guess)

5. In the Caja file manager, if the trash bin is not selected or in focus, right-clicking does not reveal the "Empty Trash" option. I think this is a "paper cut" that has existed for a while, but I thought I would add it to the list since I was making one.

6. Right-clicking on an icon in the Mutiny panel causes the available options to appear at the top of the panel rather than next to the icon.

[yerbestpal]

My Windows 10 virtual machine image on virt-manager now completely freezes the Eoan host and win10 guest when it gets to login, requiring a hard reset. It worked fine on 19.04. Other than that, this is a fantastic release.

[monamtb]

Hi,

While installing Ubuntu Mate 19.10 in German language the wifi connector step connected to the available Wifi but then didn't free the "Next" button - I switched to the regular no wifi button - back to connect to wifi - and suddenly the "Next" button was available to proceed with the next installation step. From then on all went smooth.

[arQon]

@vkareh - Do you think that will fix https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/mate-applets/+bug/1841854 ?

[vkareh]

@arQon - no, that's not related.

That bug is due to issues in vertical panels, that has been a source of pain for a while and needs to be addressed, but it's not related to my previous fix.

[arQon]

Pity - I thought I might have gotten lucky there.

As far as "for a while" goes, I can say that it wasn't there as late as 18.04. IDK how much bisection that would need, or if the bug is actually caused by the icon rather than the code, but if you do want to look for it that might narrow things down a little.

[vkareh]

It dates from 1.20, I think, when we rewrote a lot of the applets to render
differently to support HiDPI displays.

The reason this issue happens is because icons come in discrete sizes:
16, 22, 24, 32, 64, etc... (all in pixels). When resizing the panel, it
looks for the closest size to match the panel size, but that size
doesn't always take into account any margins that the panel may have.
Depending on the algorithm, it might choose a better size whether you're
resizing up or down, it all feels a bit arbitrary, but that's just part
of the flaw in the size selection algorithm.

Then different applets behave differently: some snap into those sizes
above, others take the closest size and re-scale the icon up or down to
match the panel. The whole thing is a bit of a mess, to be entirely
honest.

The correct fix would be to force the sizes of the icons during load and
resize, and to take into account the panel margin when determining which
icon size to load... or something like that... /shrug

[arQon]

hmm... I've been up all night so I'm not at my sharpest, but it really shouldn't be hard to at least end up with an icon that isn't too LARGE, even if it's smaller than would be ideal. Of course, this is the sort of thing that's often surprisingly tricky to actually get right until you FIND that "simple" calculation, so yeah, been there...
(And if each applet is doing things its own way on top of that, then "a bit of a mess" sounds about right).

A "simple" closest is, obviously, going to be badly wrong at least as often as it's right. Trying to remember the last time I did something like this, you want either the closest >= size if you ARE going to scale it (because otherwise it'll alias), or the closest <= size if you aren't. But of course, no matter which approach you take you have to have the right value for "size" for either of them to work, so if that calc isn't handling margins properly then it's going to be heavily luck-dependent no matter what.
(And you have to cater for things like not necessarily HAVING an icon >= size and being forced to scale up).

Although... given that a margin is by definition something that should NOT be rendered on, does that value actually matter? I don't think it does - the "raw" panel width is what they should be sizing to.

I need sleep. I'll try to work out clean logic for this over the weekend, if I remember and you don't beat me to it.

[vkareh]

I'll try to work out clean logic for this over the weekend, if I remember and you don't beat me to it.

Please do!! We could seriously use some more developers working on these
things!

Regarding the panel margin, different themes apply different margins.
And keep in mind that applets are all built differently, some are
a plain image widget, others are a combination of nested containers
with a button. This is why each applet ends up behaving differently.

Choosing the panel size as the image size often leads to cut-off images.

About the "a bit of a mess" part: Some of these applets are approaching
their 20th birthday, many of these are old enough to drink legally in
some countries. There's definitely a bunch of junk left over from
years and years of changes and upgrades and bugfixes. It's messy any way
you look at it