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 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-bugs-dist-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
