Bug#658783: MATE Desktop Environment in Debian
Hello,
I would like to support the inclusion of MATE in Debian. While I'm not
sure whether MATE is ready yet for the inclusion in Debian due to the
aforementioned issues (plus the MATE Debian packages aren't aware
of Multi-Arch), I am confident that bringing MATE to Debian would be a
wise choice.
While I am not disregarding GNOME3 and it's design philisophy per se,
I think that the changes introduced with GNOME3 are rather problematic
in large-scale installations with many different users.
We're running Debian Squeeze at a physics department of a large
university, deploying it on several hundred machines with over
a thousand users. Many of our users aren't computer geeks, they're
physicists and they use the computer as a tool to get their work
done. For this, they need an easy-to-use and unobtrusive desktop which
behaves like what they know from their Windows or Mac machines at
home, GNOME2 suits here perfectly and thus, most of our users actually
run GNOME2.
We have recently started to deploy Debian Wheezy on some of the
machines to be able to do some testing in the real world.
Unfortunately, the feedback we received regarding GNOME3 so far
is mostly negative. Not because users dislike the interface design,
but rather because they simply don't find their way around in the new
user interface. It's hard to justify, for example, why a user can't
have icons on their desktops anymore, many people rely on this
feature. Yes, I know one can re-enable with the tweak-tool,
but I cannot seriously run into 250+ offices and show users how to
do that.
Plus, all the current display managers won't allow our users to choose
their preferred session and language and store this setting in their
home directory, so that both session and language are being remembered
even when logging in to a different machine on the network.
Anyway, I think that it would be reasonable to include the MATE
desktop in Debian once the upstream developers have fixed all points
of criticism and from talking with them and their roadmap [1], I know
that they're actually working on it.
The fact that even Fedora (with RedHat being the main driving force
and employer behind GNOME) is working to adopt MATE [2] shows that
there is definetely a need for it and many people are actually using
it.
Cheers,
Adrian
> [1] http://wiki.mate-desktop.org/roadmap
> [2] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/MATE-Desktop
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