The future of MATE and other potential default desktops

JDV82

Hi everyone,

What is the long term plan for moving forward away from MATE? Is MATE still going to be actively developed, or is there a plan to make another X11 supported desktop environment the default option like Cinnamon? I'm aware of Gershwin being another potential option if MATE's future doesn't look positive but there's a lot of work needed until it's mature enough to be a stable option. Would Cinnamon be a better alternative to MATE moving forward for the future with X11 support? Ubuntu Cinnamon seems very stable and mature. Does it fit in with Ghost BSD's requirements?

me12345

There was a response from the GhostBSD owner , Eric , on the future direction see the link below. It also includes a link to blog post addressing the future.
https://forums.ghostbsd.org/d/771-my-blog-post-about-ghostbsd-future

Gershwin with XLibre appears to be the consensus among most in the GhostBSD community. Personally I would rather see labwc or even XFCE as XFCE has a strong community here and both have strong communities with many Linux distributions. Wayland is also planned for XFCE.

JDV82

XLibre looks very positive. After some digging I stumbled across the perfect DE for GhostBSD. It's called SonicDE.

SonicDE, the Sonic Desktop Environment

"We aim to preserve and improve the X11-specific aspects of KDE since they announced they are going Wayland-only in KDE Plasma 6.8"

To be honest, KDE Plasma looks like the ideal solution. Gershwin needs a lot of development.

me12345

JDV82

SonicDE and TrinityDE are just old KDE version with some updates so I think they would be a poor choice. FreeBSD already decided to add KDE Plasma install script planned with 15.2 release.

For any modern machines KDE Plasma would be best choice all around and Ghost BSD can leverage the FreeBSD maintenance. For older machines a simpler MATE, XFCE or Labwc would be fine. And for the oldest machines even LXDE or icewm.

Edward1978

me12345 What's wrong with Sonic, it is KDE without Wayland, but not the 40 year old X.
Imagine a software project that’s been 15 years into making. A project that, after all this time, is still rather beta in quality. A project that can only do a portion of what its predecessor technology could and can do, and yet it is hailed as a “modern replacement”. A project that no one really wants to use, as it’s cumbersome, it breaks a lot of things, and doesn’t do what it ought to. A project that is now being forced onto the users through arbitrary decisions, because it’s the only way it could ever possibly be adopted. You would think this is something coming from a greedy big corpo like Apple or Google or Microsoft. Nope, it’s the open-source “darling” Wayland.

Wayland cannot do (or do well) tons of things: VNC server, remote desktop, SSH X forwarding, custom keyboard bindings, numerous accessibility options, legacy software, absolute desktop positioning, screen sharing and recording, CAD/EDA tools, performance, and then some. All of these are critical use cases, but they don’t seem to matter in the shiny happy new future that Wayland brings.

I vote SonicDE (I love KDE, but not Wayland, Xlibre is good & still being deved). If you want the thread https://forum.manjaro.org/t/x-org-server-new-security-vulnerabilities-discovered/188103/60