Bug#658783: MATE Desktop Environment in Debian
It is so unfortunate that this matter has become so emotional. No
wonder. The gnome people worked so hard to create what they believe to
be even better desktop. And Linux community's response was
overwhelmingly negative (including public and rather outspoken
statements by major Linux developers).
However, that has seriously obscured the actual questions about it.
Everyone, including gnome developers, should realize that gnome3 is not
an upgrade of gnome2 (except by name). It is entirely different and new
product. I think it is detrimental to give them comparative labels like
good vs. bad, modern vs. old fashioned, easy vs. difficult (my 83 year
old mother uses gnome2 daily) etc.
As I see it, they are good for different kind of people and/or different
kind of use.
E.g. what I have observed, most people (in office or home) use only one
application at the time, or if they have more than one running they
still use them in fullscreen mode and only rarely start new ones or stop
old ones or switch in between them. Most have never heard of terminal
window (command prompt in MSW).
I on the contrary belong to the group that have display full of
overlapping windows belonging to various ongoing projects (both my day
work and hobbies) and constantly start new terminals, Firefox windows,
pdfs, docs, etc (and do a lot of cut/pastes in between them). This seems
to be the way a lot of scientist, engineers, software developers, etc
work (and plenty of them use Debian).
Also, there are small touchscreens and laptops, and there are 27"
desktop displays.
And what comes to aesthetics, these are matters of taste, not matters of
better or worse.
So DEBIAN, please, give us all the possible choices there are. Don't get
entangled in flame wars or secondary technical issues.
Regards!
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