Le 12.10.2013 14:04, Mark Allums a écrit :
I'm not nagging about you. My concern is to nag about recommending athird party repository, that is known to cause issues. If the OP doeslike Cinnamon, then IMO the OP should use the official packages toensure that it's as stable as possible and not to switch to Mate from a third party repository. If the OP needs a bug fix or a new feature ofCinnamon 2.0, it might be worse the effort to build it from source.The point of mentioning MATE was in context with adding MATE to Debian. Our point was, there are only minor problems with that happening, and they should be solvable fairly easily within a short period of time
(i.e., in the time between releases of Stable).
This problem is not MATE specific. All DEs in Debian have it: in Debian stable, the one that I am now running on the computer with which I now use to work, XFCE is only at version 4.8, but IIRC XFCE4.10 was released before Debian started the freeze. MATE could go in Debian, if one of it's users accept to become it's maintainer. If it was so easy, then I can only guess that MATE's users finally do not care that much to have it into official repo, and should accept that other people uses that as an argument that it *might* give problems. Because, yes, 3rd party repo are possible, but are not supported by Debian.
And, things which *might* give problems which are not supported by the OS's maintainers made things harder for people not willing to deal with problems. When you start to have more than one team responsible for the state of a system, and when a problem appear, you usually have annoying games of ping-pong.
In short: if you are so sure that MATE is fine, and want to advertise it a lot, stop whining about Debian which refuses it, and start the way to integrate it into Debian. I think the dev team will be happy to have more manpower and provide more DE choice.
MATE is usable NOW, and it's mainly an irrational attachment to Gnome that prevents it, not any real problems with MATE. People are abandoning Gnome 3 in droves. Most are turning to XFCE, I think largely because it is already in Debian. If MATE were in Debian, a large contingent of those people would use MATE if it were available, I think, because most of them were using GNOME 2 before.
And what about those people being ancient gnome users because gnome is the default, and not because gnome is better (1) ? Maybe the problems they had with gnome encouraged them to try other DEs, like KDE, XFCE and LXDE present in Debian, and from that base, choosing the one which fit best their needs. Perhaps they would not return to gnome2 know, because they finally think that it is inferior for their uses to XFCE?
Notice that, as you, I made hypothetic assertions based on the wind to make other's choices and opinions fitting my needs without asking them. Aka, that XFCE is better than gnome, which I do not truly think. They're simply different.
1: I was never able to understand what people can find to gnome, even the gnome2 DE. Matter of taste, of course. KDE was better suited for me, but shared a problem: too monolithic. So only XFCE and LXDE in Debian were able to satisfy me at start. Now, even them are not correct enough for me (but I still use some LXDE apps).