Garuda MATE :maté: ensuring continued support

Hello fellow Garudians,

This is a thread to start a discussion about the future maintenance of the MATE edition isos.

A few people have expressed interest in continuing to use the MATE edition here: Dropping several garuda editions

The MATE desktop environment is the ultimate continuation of the Gnome 2 style workflow and is the preferred desktop environment for those who value a traditional desktop with a robust set of tools. For these reasons it is my first priority out of the proposed dropped editions, but if I feel comfortable enough I may be able to pick another one. Feel free to reply if you would like to help and/or learn with me!

One change that has already been proposed is optimizing the panel icons. Once we have enough proposed changes, we can fork the gitlab and request a build.

Soar on ~

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I'm absolutely on board with helping and learning and I share your concern for a few
of the editions that may go away (especially MATE). I have a weekend full of obligations but after that I intend to get started researching and figuring out the details of maintaining a
desktop environment. I'm very excited and somewhat anxious about it, I don't like
being in a position where I may have to ask questions that may sound stupid, but that's just
something I'll have to deal with. Looking forward to this!

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@ me of you need help with something :+1:

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I will gladly help.
EDIT: made 2 merge requests to change icons to papirus which fixes the ugly tray icons. I hope.

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EDIT: made 2 merge requests to change icons to papirus which fixes the ugly tray icons. I hope.

Awesome!

Here is my proposed default look:


Customized theme:

  • Controls: Sweet-Dark
  • Window border: DustBlue
  • Icons: Papirus-Dark
  • Pointer: Sweet-Cursors

Panel:

  • Advanced MATE Menu instead of classic menu (In Mint this is called “Brisk Menu”, I think it would be cool if we called it “Glide Menu”, following the tone of “Soaring Installer”).
  • Panel size: 28
  • Panel and Tray icon size: 16 (although it seems to adjust them automatically no matter what).

Terminal Profile colors:
Grey on Black, Linux Console

Another cool feature that I always turn on is that the mouse determines the active window (old Unix style). I think it would be very appropriate for the MATE edition to ship with that turned on by default.

Let me know what you all think. The current version looks very much like the Dragonized, so these changes can give it a little more character.

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Cool I will gladly help I will make some tweaks.

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Since I’ve been using MATE for so long I had to download a new ISO and I noticed that as far as
‘Controls:’ options go there are Sweet-Dark and Raleigh, so of those two I would agree that
Sweet-Dark is the better option. There was a time when the MATE ISO had a flat-remix-GTK-and color
variations of Red, Blue, Green and Yellow. Perhaps that could be brought back? just a thought.
I think DustBlue as window border is a nice choice and I have been using Papirus-Dark Icons for quite
a while so I obviously agree with your choice there as well!

I really like the idea of deviating a bit from Dragonized which is why I thought maybe the flat-remix
option would help. I know it might just be me but bright purple just isn’t my thing.

One small thing I have always liked about MATE is using a black background color and then adjusting
to about 30-40% transparency on the panels. Maybe something simple like that adds a little nuance?
I don’t know, maybe not, just a thought.

I think it’s great you’re moving forward with this. I’ll be thinking of possible things to tweak the ISO
look and feel, and the part I’m most curious about is the nitty gritty of maintenance and updating.
I’ll be finding out as much as I can about that as well.

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It was changed a few months back to use Sweet, feel free to change that! :slight_smile: Diversity is also a nice thing :wink:

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I did think the current iso offers very limited choices. The gtk 3.0 variant of Sweet is also not present so selecting the preset Sweet theme gives an error.

I agree 100%. Went with the Sweet-dark for now because it fit a little better than Raleigh, but it’s definitely out of character given the other changes. We could bring back the flat remix or of course explore other options to include.

Same here… I need to properly learn git and familiarize myself with the build process. I just find that I learn best by having a concept first, then figuring out what it takes to execute it.

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Ok I will tweak the settings package.

Hey @RUanauR @librewish, recent merge looking pretty good, would it be possible to get a test iso of Garuda MATE?

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Yes of course :dragon:
Here we go.

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Hi @RUanauR, thank you for making some changes. However in this last image it seems like some icons are missing, and the icon theme change to Papirus in gtk-3.0/settings.ini doesn't seem to be reflected. I've forked the iso-profiles and garuda-mate settings to try and tweak some things, but I am really not sure what I'm doing. Would you take a look at my To-Do.txt file and see if you can help?

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Thanks for merging, @dr460nf1r3 :+1:
Would appreciate an iso when you get a chance!

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https://builds.garudalinux.org/iso/community/mate/210418/garuda-mate-linux-zen-210418.iso

Here you are :slight_smile:

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Ok, this image is quite presentable, though I cannot for the life of me figure out how to configure the main icon theme to be Papirus-Dark. Thought I’d try editing .gtkrc-2.0 and .config/qt5ct/qt5ct.conf but that didn’t do it either (.config/gtk-3.0/settings.ini already has this change).
I’m figuring things out very slowly but will keep at it. Any assistance would be welcome with open hands!

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you need to change schema override file

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Thank you!

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Given MATE is related to GNOME it might also be possible to use dconf to store settings.
You can dump settings with dconf dump / > dconf.ini

For reference have a look at the GNOME profile :slight_smile:

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Can comferm mate uses dconf.

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