Re: s/gnome2/mate + gnome3 ?

["David H. Gutteridge" <dhgutteridge%sympatico.ca@localhost>]

On Sat, 04 Apr 2015 at 11:33:22 -0400, Greg Troxel wrote:
>I am curious if anyone is still using our gnome2 packages, and if they'd
>just switch to MATE were it available.  I gave up on gnome2 recently,
>moving to xfce4, which is adequate for multiple desktops and a small
>taskbar with a clock.
>
>Certainly getting mate into pkgsrc seems like a good thing, and I don't
>see any reason other than no one has gotten to it.  Then, deleting
>gnome2 or updating it to 3 is probably the right thing, but I don't know
>how people that use gnome2 feel about mate (probably positive, it
>seems).

I was using the Gnome 2 packages under NetBSD 5.2 until a few weeks
ago, when I upgraded the machine in question to 7.0_BETA to test it
in general. I saw there were MATE packages available in wip, so I
opted to try those instead. I built everything that was pulled in by
the wip meta-package and tried it out. I found it didn't entirely
work for me. There was more than one issue that I haven't resolved.
One of them is definitely unrelated to MATE specifically (it's an
issue with sysutils/hal), but the other one may be. If I try to use
any MATE applications, they run but never render on-screen. If I run
a simpler GTK2 application (like geany) or a GTK3 application (like
gedit 3), they work fine. (I can also run MATE applications in an
alternate window manager without issue, so something weird was
happening in a pure MATE environment.)

I ended up using fluxbox with the various options (e.g. Xft support)
enabled and that gave me a no-frills environment that works reliably,
though I'd prefer some of the features a more fully-featured desktop
environment provides. (I've never tried Xfce, but am curious about it
now too.)

Regards,

Dave