Fedora Adds MATE and Cinnamon Desktops to Main Repository, Releases Beta

Already available in third party repositories, the GNOME 2 fork MATE and GNOME 3 fork Cinnamon will now be included in Fedora 18. From the H: "After almost two months' delay, the Fedora Project has released the first and final beta of Fedora 18. The distribution, which is code-named 'Spherical Cow,' includes the MATE desktop – a continuation of the classic GNOME 2 interface – in its repositories for the first time. Fedora 18's default edition uses GNOME 3.6.2 as its interface and a separate KDE Spin provides the KDE Software Collection 4.9.3; Xfce 4.10 and version 1.6.7 of Linux Mint's Cinnamon are also available from the distribution's repositories."

Will MATE make it into RHEL?

[kthreadd]

Since RedHat uses Fedora as a base when they build their enterprise distribution, is there any chance that MATE will now get there? We're using RHEL 5 and 6 on some desktops, running really good crafted versions of GNOME 2. And I'm not looking forward to the day RHEL 7 comes out with what I assume will be GNOME 3. I like some of the things they are doing, and one day it will probably be as good as GNOME 2; but that day is not now. Getting MATE included into RHEL would certainly be a good thing.

Why bother, XFCE is all you need

[digitect]

After struggling to use Gnome 3 since Fedora officially released it, I recently tried XFCE again and was blown away with how fast and suitable it is. The defaults are good and there are tons of options to customize it back to the similar paradigm Gnome 2 was. I couldn't believe how much faster my machine felt after switching. Even moving Firefox tabs was better!

I gave G3 PLENTY of time and never could feel comfortable with it even after slowly adding extension after extension to get something workable. The visual component of a desktop is important, and the G3 simply hides too much that is necessary to use it. It's like having a car with no dashboard. The so-called "easy"methods to reveal open windows and find applications are hard to discover, require too much input and memory, and are too slow.

After this weekend's pleasurable re-discovery of the improved XFCE, I'm never going back. Gnome doesn't matter any more to me.

Re:Will MATE make it into RHEL?

[fnj]

I would guess that it is practically a given. RHEL7 is supposedly going to be forked from F18.

Re:Will MATE make it into RHEL?

[trollebolle]

I would guess that it is practically a given. RHEL7 is supposedly going to be forked from F18.

I would guess not. Though RHEL7 will be based on F18 or thereabouts, RHEL only includes a subset of the packages that exist in Fedora. Remember that Red Hat will be supporting the packages for 10 years. They'll choose the package subset with care. But on the other hand, I wouldn't be surprised to see MATE in EPEL7.

KDE and Razor QT

[Seeteufel]

KDE and Razor Qt are the future. Gnome was nice but not anymore. Dolphin is so much better than what Nautilus has to offer. I would say, simply port KDE to LLVM and we'll get a bulletproof desktop system.