This is why I personally like MATE. I remember when they switched from Gnome 2 to Unity, and I just stopped using Ubuntu until I discovered Mint, which I installed with MATE and the rest was history.
I've moved on from Mint, but the fact that the MATE dev community took the tried and true paradigms learned from Gnome 2 and made kept them alive in spirit won me over. I installed Ubuntu MATE to a box just the other day.
Ubuntu MATE is a phenomenal distro. For VMs and lower resource machines it is always my go to.
Not to imply that it isn't valuable on high end machines (it is), but I personally really like Gnome 3 these days once I got used to it's way of doing things.
Never got this complaint. Just because something different is installed by default doesn't mean you can't install something else (or use one of the many _buntu's to make life a little easier)
A constant window manager is actually one of the strong points of linux. Lot of people still use twm.
When someone complains that they enjoyed using DE X, and the distro switches to DE Y, they get told that they can just install and keep using DE X. When they later come asking about issues they're having related to DE X, they get told that it's not officially supported and that they should probably switch to DE Y.
Both responses on their own are perfectly reasonable, but it's understandable if users get a bit frustrated.
They aren't just changing the default, they are dropping it entirely. The GNOME port is noticeably different. Apparently some other company is going to continue work on the original Unity and I hope that works out.
To give another example, one upgrade my Xmodmap stopped working, and I had to stop everything to learn how xkb worked. If there is some package I could install to just have Xmodmap work again, that'd be great, but I wasn't able to figure it out at the time.
Rooster61|6 years ago
I've moved on from Mint, but the fact that the MATE dev community took the tried and true paradigms learned from Gnome 2 and made kept them alive in spirit won me over. I installed Ubuntu MATE to a box just the other day.
freedomben|6 years ago
Not to imply that it isn't valuable on high end machines (it is), but I personally really like Gnome 3 these days once I got used to it's way of doing things.
thaumasiotes|6 years ago
jjrh|6 years ago
A constant window manager is actually one of the strong points of linux. Lot of people still use twm.
mort96|6 years ago
Both responses on their own are perfectly reasonable, but it's understandable if users get a bit frustrated.
chrismonsanto|6 years ago
To give another example, one upgrade my Xmodmap stopped working, and I had to stop everything to learn how xkb worked. If there is some package I could install to just have Xmodmap work again, that'd be great, but I wasn't able to figure it out at the time.