Mate appears to be crashing on startup. Screen stays frozen on wallpaper

wooper91

Hello all,

I’m new to BSD I’ve had some experience with Linux and when trying to see what some people suggested as a distribution for me someone actually suggested maybe I look at freeBSD as well so I’m here 🙂

I got ghostBSD installed fairly easily and all was good, I’m an nvidia user so I had to install the nvidia drivers which also went smoothly. Then I updated the system and at that point when I would log back in my desktop would be frozen

I thought it was weird so I tried a few times and each time I got a message about the workspace switcher wasn’t working and the message was flickering. Other times I didn’t get the message but my dock would be flickering and nothing would render on it and nothing was interactable not even the right click menu appeared

I decided to go into tty and run mate-session and that yielded the “cannot open display” error. I’m hoping someone can assist so I can get going with GhostBSD and see if it’s something I wanna stick with.

My guess is something that updated broke but not sure what. I did install nvidia drivers before updating so idk if that caused any issues :/

vimanuelt

wooper91
I would suggest sticking with the default drivers that GhostBSD provides. Downloading drivers from Nvidia directly and installing them can cause issues.

Robin

The Xfce spin doesn't seem to have as many issues... I've been using the unofficial Xfce community edition from the start and it's been pretty much trouble-free. I know very little about MATE except that it's a fork of Gnome 2. So I'm just guessing that GTK 2 and GTK 3 have some conflicts.

vimanuelt

Robin
As the GTK project evolves, the GhostBSD project follows its direction closely, for upon GTK the desktop environments of GhostBSD depend. Presently, MATE remains the primary desktop, and it continues to rely on GTK 3. With the release of GTK 4, significant structural changes have been introduced. The rendering model has shifted to GPU acceleration via Vulkan and OpenGL. The traditional widget layout has been replaced, and the theming engine no longer resembles that of GTK 3. While these advancements serve the goals of modern GNOME development, they are incompatible with the design philosophy and implementation of traditional desktops like MATE.

No official plan to migrate to GTK 4 has been announced by the MATE project. The desktop continues to be developed against GTK 3, and for reasons of stability and continuity, it remains so. However, as the broader GTK ecosystem advances, GTK 3 receives less attention. Themes that once worked flawlessly now require patching to appear consistent across GTK 3 and GTK 4 applications. Bugs in GTK 3 remain unresolved for longer periods, and the effort to maintain visual and functional coherence grows.

For the MATE desktop to adopt GTK 4, a near-complete rewrite of its components would be required. The Caja file manager, the panels, and the applets are all written with assumptions about GTK 3 that no longer apply in GTK 4. The architecture has changed, and the migration path is steep. The MATE project, with limited developer resources, may not possess the capacity to undertake such a transformation without external support.

The GhostBSD project is now placed in a position of strategic decision-making. Remaining with GTK 3 ensures short-term stability but introduces long-term risk. As more upstream applications adopt GTK 4, integration problems will increase, and user experience may suffer. Forking GTK 3 to maintain a stable platform is an option, though it carries with it a significant maintenance burden.

MATE remains valued for its simplicity and coherence, and the GhostBSD project continues to support it. However, the future of GTK will shape the direction of the entire GhostBSD desktop strategy. Careful observation of upstream developments continues. Alternative environments are being evaluated, and contingency planning is underway. Should the MATE project stagnate or should GTK 3 become unmaintainable, I believe the GhostBSD project will be prepared to shift direction to preserve user experience and system reliability.

Robin

Pretty much the same story applies to the Xfce desktop, which has been much slower to change and new releases are rare. Depending on your preference, that's either a good thing (rock-stable) or a bad one (dated). I value stability and simplicity and I hope the desktops that depend on GTK keep up...

That said, however,

Dependency on GTK and/or Qt toolkits is always going to be a problem when one updates and all it's dependencies become buggy and messy. That's why rumors of an alternative toolkit that doesn't run ahead of it's dependent applications; one in which the toolkit and the desktop grow together as a single project, have my keen interest now, when I was put off by the idea at first.