I’ve just written a brief article on what I’ve called “the joys of simple computing”, i.e. simple, performant, native applications, snappy systems, and a simpler web. I’d love to hear your thoughts as well, as I have a gut feeling this message would resonate here.
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Really enjoyed this, shared. The Xfce point hits home for me, there’s something about a desktop that just opens things instantly by default instead of animating you through a two-second wait. Snappy is what modern should mean.
Might catch some heat for this one but I think Xfce is the new MATE, especially with the built in settings that make a 2-panel setup so easy.
Xfce ships with a proper panel manager where you can add a second panel, set it to the bottom, drop a window buttons default plugin on it and you’ve basically recreated the classic MATE bottom-taskbar-top-menu layout in about two minutes, no config files needed. MATE leaned hard into being the sane traditional GNOME 2 continuation, but Xfwm plus the panel prefs cover most of that same ground now without the extra weight.
You also get the same low resource footprint MATE is known for, plus Xfce’s dev pace has picked up with the GTK3 work landing. So you get the familiar traditional layout, the light footprint, and slow but active development all in one.
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Yep. That’s why I’ve enjoyed my Ubuntu-Mate setup so much over the years.
Simple. No distraction. No ‘new look’ after another (just do yours).
It simply works, no fuzz.
‘Progress’ mean that one has given a direction to go… Which may not be a progress in someone else’s eyes. And being trendy most of times ends up being short fused.
W
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Absolutely! One of the reasons of picking Xfce over MATE for me is definitely that it seems to be rather more actively developed, which feels a bit more comfortable to me.
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Maybe I’ll catch more heat, but first I’ll share my caveat, and maybe that will “save our hydes”: there are numerous choices and I may prefer one thing, you may prefer another, and five more people may have five other preferences - all of them are alternatives and that’s precisely why the Free Software movement came into being in the first place!
I’ve never been keen on any variations of GNOME, though I actually like and prefer the Gtk+ toolkit for building quick graphical interfaces, so MATE, GNOME, Cinnamon and others in the “family” are not my choices. It’s not because they don’t “look good”, many of them do. I just prefer lighter stuff for one and things that I can alter.
Long ago I liked KDE - but I mean LONG ago, such as Version 2.2; never was very fond of KDE Plasma. I finally figured out how to customize some things, but Plasma is just too big.
Xfce makes a clean interface and it is easy to alter, but I don’t really need it either. I’ve actually found a simple window manager that has actually had updates in the past few years - IceWM, that meets my objectives of being highly configurable and efficient. Fluxbox and JWM are, too, but I prefer the configuration syntax offered by IceWM.
So there you have it. There are so many ways to do things. My ways are not BETTER, they just suit my personal needs, and so it is with each of us.
I have read that many people really enjoy the Mate interface, and I am very happy that there’s an enjoyable interface with the capabilities it offers; clearly many people enjoy it!
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