MATE Desktop and a little thought...

[Daevid Vincent]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: ubuntu-users-bounces at lists.ubuntu.com [mailto:ubuntu-users-
> bounces at lists.ubuntu.com] On Behalf Of Juan R. de Silva
> Sent: Friday, July 20, 2012 12:02 PM
> To: ubuntu-users at lists.ubuntu.com
> Subject: Re: MATE Desktop
> 
> On Fri, 20 Jul 2012 19:24:01 +0100, Graham Todd wrote:
> 
> > Are there any plans to offer an option for the MATE desktop at the
> > system install in future versions of Ubuntu?
> >
> > Being very like the Gnome 2 Desktop, MATE offers people who cannot get
> > on with the Unity shell and people who just would like to try the MATE
> > desktop the option to do so, without messing about with the official
> > GNOME 3 Desktop.
> 
> Are you joking? Are you asking if Canonical is going to shoot in its own
> foot? :-)

It could be argued that Canonical already DID shoot its own foot with this
Unity debacle. ;-)

That has been a thorn since it's introduction and what I attribute to the
mass exodus away from Ubuntu -- which WAS the dominant distro (even
trouncing on RedHat/Fedora long ago to take the crown).

http://distrowatch.com/

Rank 	Distribution 	H.P.D*
1 	Mint 		3859<
2 	Ubuntu 	2201=
3 	Mageia 	1774>
4 	Fedora 	1697<
5 	Debian 	1361<
6 	openSUSE 	1349=
7 	Arch 		1154>
8 	CentOS 	988>
9 	Puppy 		853=
10 	PCLinuxOS 	784>

Mint seems to have a significant lead over Ubuntu and includes MATE
http://www.linuxmint.com/download.php

I've not used Mint, but hear great things. Also isn't it based upon Ubuntu,
so wouldn't it follow that the MATE packages should work on an Ubuntu system
too?


OT: I find these types of phenomena very interesting. I mean, how some
company/product/service/even distro can be so massive and seem that they
will never falter and yet somehow manage to royally fsck something up so
badly that they collapse. Gentoo, SUSE, and Solaris, come to mind on a
distro scale. On larger scales, Altavista was huge at one time, now where
are they? Yahoo was the king of search and absolutely crushed by Google
search. Digg was THE news site and sold for millions and now it was just
sold off for a pathetic $500k. Friendster was the hot new social network
that stole the title from Six Degrees (yeah, remember that?) and then
Myspace came along and drank their milkshake. Now they too are just a sad
sad shell of what it was, and Facebook owns that domain by a landslide.
Google+ will ultimately fail. I'm not saying G+ is good or bad, I'm just
stating a fact. It will fail, and that in itself is interesting as it's one
of the first times that something with such potential to take the top spot
is so doomed. Massive amounts of money and smarts, polish and integration
with so much googleness, and yet it just won't take hold. UNLESS Facebook
REALLY screws the pooch. It seems FB gets away with a LOT of sketchy stuff
the user's hate, but yet they are really the monopoly and so they (for now)
can do what they want. But mark my words, there will be another contender to
come out of nowhere. Some small startup will swoop in and be the hot new
social network and we'll be saying, "remember facebook and google+"?
Anyways, end of my stream of thought...