Sure, MATE has evolved to give more options, and distros seem to like defaulting its look to something non-traditional, but the traditional look is still very GNOME2 and very much alive. I've got an old desktop from 2009 that's run Gentoo the whole time , I never upgraded to GNOME3, but I did switch to MATE when it came out, and haven't had to mess with it since apart from trying out different icon sets or other small theme changes. It looks basically the same as ever, even compared to my old laptop screenshots from 2007 -- I still have my wobbly windows from Compiz (fka Beryl) too.
They are updating it, but keeping the original style as much as possible. The forked apps, like the file manager (caja), archive manager (engrampa), text editor (pluma) etc. still have menubars and so on, but, for example, it is using dconf/gsettings and MATE in Ubuntu MATE 16.10 is all GTK+3.
They've also integrated features for setting panel layouts, and there is one ("Mutiny") that mimics Unity. They're even working on a HUD-like feature.
The old "classic" panel look has been deprecated upstream, it doesn't really exist any more so I don't know what you're expecting Ubuntu to do in this case.
Honestly, I disagree. Their Gnome theme looks as/more modern then any default look for any other OS/DE that I've seen, with the possible exception of KDE.
Last time I tried Gnome I was struggling with the inability to remap shortcuts to clear a way for using my Emacs bindings without the desktop interfering. The ctrl-shift-f for a global search sounds like a generally bad idea that will conflict with a lot applications. Or maybe it doesn't impose itself on applications but only the desktop, I don't know.
But one thing I know that if I disagree with Gnome developers then I'll have a hard time working around and hacking my own way in. I've usually ended up starting to patch Gnome/Gtk components at which points I just realize that it is absolutely futile and I give up.
Gnome used to be the marvel of configurability. Around Gnome2 time there were gazillion settings and options that you could change, and even more via gsettings/gconf. Then the UI was gradually dumbed down but you could still configure most things. "Tweak" tools appeared. Now it seems I bump into an ideological obstacle left and right, and even the tweak tools won't let me change anything much besides some cosmetic properties.
Mate has some rough edges but it's pretty much the only thing that still works for a power user that wants an UI with a traditional window manager of my choice instead of whatever tiling configuration is in hype this year.
As long as I have the old-school styled MATE Desktop I'll be fine (XFCE is ok too once configured, just not my preferred enviro). Honestly, the UI should be err on keeping it simple and fast, animate IFF it is minimal and gives user useful feedback, always include 'open terminal here' contextmenu (be proud Linux), file browser should have up, back, forward buttons and a way to copy the path, and a bar to place oft use applications, and multiple desktops. That is all I want. Simple,no?
All distros "look" the same to me, because I use a tiling window manager. I don't see a desktop, I just see what I'm working on. The gnome2/gnome3/unity silliness was partly why.
I don't understand all these people saying it's ugly. It's gtk. The screenshots are old. Gtk these days looks modern,you can make it look however you want depending on what theme you choose. https://www.gnome-look.org/browse/cat/135/ord/latest/
The thing is, you can change a lot of those things to match what you want. You can toggle the application menu, which works more like the windows menu. You can use something like dash-to-panel [0] to make the top bar into something useful.
I know that in Firefox you can disable the window bar to make it look a lot cleaner with a top bar.
Here is a screenshot of how my GNOME looks [1]. I don't have the application menu because I use an app launcher, so it doesn't bother me that much.
That's an investment you have to make if you want it to look like you want to. Maybe you just want to have a DE that works for you without tweaking it, which I understand. But I'm pretty sure you could make a GNOME desktop you like given the time.
Having tested multiple desktop environment and window managers, it's pretty great having such a diverse pool of choices : you can really ditch GNOME completely if you don't like it.
I Like (or liked) Gnome Shell too. But to me it is still broken. There are a lot of whys that i don't understand:
Why is it that some apps maximize, or take up half the screen and lose their title bar? I like my title bars. This should be an all or none thing.
Why are all the themes I find broken? I found the answer to this myself. The latest gnome 3 has a lot of changes which essentially break a lot of themes. I dislike the main theme as i find it is too "fat". Things are bigger than they need to be, and it makes me feel stupid. an alternate theme would fix this easily, as things are smaller in certain themes. Sadly my favourite shiki-colors themes are probably never going to support gtk3 and all the other gnome 3 themes i have found are broken in 3.6.
Why have you removed configuration options that you had in gnome 2? I found a lot of what i was missing in gnome tweak tool, But it seems like someone has decided that I don’t need those options, and it makes me feel stupid.
Why has connect to remote server in nautilus become unhelpful? I know from my experience from linux in teh past few years that i can access windows shares by going smb:// and ssh with sftp://, but in gnome 2 i had a nice list of what woul work, and what i required to enter to get to it. It was helpful when i was learning my way around accessing what i need to at my job. In gnome 3 i have a location bar to enter a URI, which seems daunting and unhelpful.
All these whys have lead me to drop gnome 3 at the current time and im trying to get along in xfce on another, which was okay until i found screen tearing is still a problem. At the moment im still using ubuntu 11.04 on my main work PC, and its just started telling me it is no longer supported, and im still on the fence of what to do.
I don’t want to go back to windows, I will miss the terminal dearly, and OSX is not for me, but i cant find a new linux based OS im currently happy to work on :(
I used to use GNOME for many years, mostly because it was the default on Ubuntu. Now it's one of my least favorite desktops, I'll use almost anything else. I got frustrated at the seemingly random, user-hostile, backwards-incompatible changes from one version to the next. From my rough memory:
* The desktop icons and click-and-drag shortcuts got removed a few years ago. This is a GUI workflow that I've been using on Windows, MacOS, Atari OS, Amiga OS, going back to the 1980s. Gone.
* They somehow obscured the sleep (or was it the shutdown) button in one version, so that I couldn't find it anymore. I think I had to search the internets for this basic functionality.
* I think one version of Ubuntu GNOME obscured the login screen. I installed it, saw no login screen, clicked everywhere, but nothing happened. Just stared at a desktop wallpaper. If I recall, I eventually figured out that I had to swipe up a little arrow at the bottom of the screen, but using a mouse. Why?
* I think there is still no image preview in their file explorer. I don't know, I don't use it anymore.
These days, I use Ubuntu MATE or Mint MATE, and occasionally drop into Mint Cinnamon to check if they squashed enough little UI bugs for me to use as daily driver. (For example, in the latest Mint Cinnamon, I set my Terminal to 161 columns. But Cinnamon would open the window at Full Screen instead. Oops, back to Mint MATE.)
You literally have to install a special tool to configure the look and feel. Did you miss the whole thing about how gnome devs don't want user themes to be supported? Or how they are forcing csd and dropping menus and config left and right? I'm guessing you weren't a gnome 2 user because it's night and day.
I really don't get the intention with the default visual style Ubuntu has settled on. I'm sure a lot of work has gone into it but it's just not attractive.
I previously thought it was growing pains and they would eventually land on a great style that was still "theirs", but at this point it feels like a lost cause. Personally I've stopped recommending Ubuntu on the desktop because I already know what the initial reaction to a fresh install is going to be.
I feel like this is weak argument these days, places like reddit.com/r/unixporn are overkill when it comes to styling a desktop environment, but a quick change to the Numix icon set and a new GTK theme makes most Linux installations with Gnome look great.
At least on alpha3, selecting the classic desktop results in broken themes. Gnome suddenly reverts to looking completely unskinned and like it did 10 years ago.
That unstyled grey look, plus the missing File, etc. menus under fvwm, caused me to abandon gnome apps under fvwm. I couldn't get a theme that supported gnome apps nicely. Sorry gnome, I don't want a mac-style menu bar.
GNOME is in a damned-if-you-do damned-if-you don't situation here; if they don't adopt the flat theme, they look "old fashioned" and if they do they have a crappy UI.
Sure, MATE has evolved to give more options, and distros seem to like defaulting its look to something non-traditional, but the traditional look is still very GNOME2 and very much alive. I've got an old desktop from 2009 that's run Gentoo the whole time , I never upgraded to GNOME3, but I did switch to MATE when it came out, and haven't had to mess with it since apart from trying out different icon sets or other small theme changes. It looks basically the same as ever, even compared to my old laptop screenshots from 2007 -- I still have my wobbly windows from Compiz (fka Beryl) too.
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