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« Last post by sorveltaja on December 16, 2025, 06:54:48 PM »
Yeah I'll probably test EasyOs at some point. But as the media is in .img format, running it in Virtualbox or Qemu isn't that straightforward.
Some gripes about Mate:
First hiccup - In both Debian and Mint versions, there's an old Gnome 2 bug:
When app shortcuts are placed to panel, their order changes after reboot, even if they are locked. Same can happen with system tray elements (volume indicator, network and clock/date). One possible solution is to place the app icons to the left end of the panel. After a few reboots, the icons are where I put them.
Another is that I've not been able to completely disable power management features. The screen still goes off after 10 minutes, if there's no activity.
Only setting screensaver timing to max (2 hours) seems to postpone that.
General things about Linux:
Distros that I've tested so far, if there's on one desktop environment (DE) (in this case Xfce) an app such as file manager (PcmanFm which requires something like catfish to be installed to search files), that one would like to replace with other like Caja, it's next to impossible to set that preferred file manager as a default. That's one of the reasons why I hopped to Mate.
And when considering installing other 'system' apps, they may well drag whole DE with them, so it's worth looking at what kind of dependencies they may have, if one attempts to make a light weight installation for an old hardware.
Some pros and cons of what I've discovered, when using minimal Debian Mate install:
+ light on resources
+ it's possible to choose a simple, or 'retro' style interface, instead of overly polished or 'modern' ones
+ as it's based on a server distro, out of the box there are much less apps that one might never use anyway
+ some Mate versions have task (or whatever) bar on both top and bottom sides - what a waste of space, but it's easy to just delete one of them. The way I've done it is to remove bottom one, and move top one which has systray items to bottom. More details perhaps later.
- Mate may not be as frequently maintained as more popular DE's
- without having fancy software center, installing certain apps like Wine requires extra, distro specific steps. Also, when trying to install apps from .deb packages, there will likely be errors - I haven't looked yet what are the prerequisites to avoid such errors
- certainly not very newbie friendly - one has to go 'under the hood', and get used to searching information about whatever tasks one wants to perform
Mint Mate, on the other hand, has more GUI tools already in it, making it somewhat easier option to get familiar with Mate.
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