[Trisquel-devel] Trisquel is based on Ubuntu

[Morne Alberts]

On Sat, Jan 28, 2012 at 12:45 PM, David VANTYGHEM
<david.vantyghem at free.fr> wrote:
>
> Mate is based on Gnome 2 and Cinnamon is based on Gnome 3, aren't they?

MATE is a fork of Gnome 2.
Cinnamon is a fork of Gnome Shell.

> Mate is packaged for Debian and Linux Mint.

Take note: I have not used MATE or Cinnamon so I do not speak from experience.

The biggest problem with MATE is that it is neither stable nor on par
with Gnome 2.32 yet, this is according to the developers and the main
distro backing it [1] [2]. This reason alone should exclude MATE from
being the default DE, at least for the next LTS release.

Also, the MATE development team and userbase is much smaller than what
Gnome 2 had. I do not think it is safe to use something as a default
if it could potentially have some issues that would end up on our
doorstep first. We would then have to push these issues upstream and
it could potentially take a while to get resolved, thus leaving
Trisquel a bit broken. This might not be the case and perhaps MATE
will work 100% for all Trisquel users and their developers might be
really fast and this could even help increase the uptake of MATE.
However, I do not think Trisquel has the resources currently to
attempt such a leap of faith.

Cinnamon, being a fork of Gnome Shell, still has the issue of
graphical acceleration [3].

Leaving the issue of software rendering aside, it seems that the
second biggest issue regarding DE choice is accessibility. I believe
this is what Ruben is currently testing with various panels and other
DE's.


[1] http://mate-desktop.org/2011/12/05/hello-world/
[2] http://www.linuxmint.com/rel_lisa_whatsnew.php
[3] http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=208&t=90670&start=20#p528493