My understanding is that MATE is the fork of the gnome-2 codebase to continue the original interface.
At the same time, gnome-3 was forked as Cinnamon, the default interface in Linux Mint. The goal was essentially the same with the primary difference that cinnamon requires a certain level of hardware support in order to function at any basic level, due to the baked-in opengl compositor used in Gnome 3+. MATE can handle CPU rendering just fine, with optional compositing. It should be trivial to configure Cinnamon to look like the old gnome interface just like you could configure MATE to look like Windows 7. I haven't touched Cinnamon in ages so I don't know exactly how, but that might be the DE you are looking for as long as your hardware supports it. Also people don't mention it very much, but the latest Xfce is actually very similar to gnome2 in visual design. At this point having MATE and Xfce as options is pretty redundant since they look like twin siblings... Back in 2012 I configured Xubuntu to imitate the desktop of Ubuntu 10.04 for production systems since we had a lot of prexisting users that would not be able to migrate to Unity. I wish Free Geek had decided to stay with that setup, but they pulled in a whole new group of non-profit marketing "fellows" who thought my masterpiece was ugly and bad for public image. On Fri, Dec 20, 2019 at 3:01 PM Russell Senior <[email protected]> wrote: > For me (and for people I'm trying to keep things easy for), the main thing > I wanted was the Applications and Places menus at the top and the bar at > the bottom. For those, look for the gnome tweak tool and look in > "Extensions". > > On Fri, Dec 20, 2019 at 2:56 PM Keith Lofstrom <[email protected]> wrote: > > > My first encounter with gnome3 was disturbing - way too > > much eye candy and gesture dependence and memory footprint. > > So, I stayed with older gnome2-using distros, but support > > for those is vanishing. > > > > I plan to use gnome2-emulating Mate with newer distros > > (specifically, from Scientific Linux 6 to S.L.7, then to > > CentOS 8 someday). > > > > However, I vaguely recall being told that gnome3 can be > > configured to behave very much like gnome2. > > > > Is this true? WHERE CAN I LEARN MORE???? > > > > If gnome3 is indeed capable of this miraculous compatibility, > > how much larger is the memory footprint and CPU usage? > > > > I plan to keep using my older Thinkpad laptops with full > > height screens and real keyboards, but those are limited > > to 4 GB RAM and 8-year-old lower-speed CPUs. > > > > If gnome2-configured gnome3 is too bloated (and when has > > software ever become smaller and more efficient?), I'll > > stick with Mate, stone knives, and bearskins. > > > > Keith > > > > PS: I am very very NOT interested in learning how to use > > /your/ personal favorite alternative distro. I am having > > trouble enough remembering how to use the distro family > > I've been using for decades, much less cope with SystemD. > > I'd rather spend my time learning about cosmology. > > > > -- > > Keith Lofstrom [email protected] > > _______________________________________________ > > PLUG mailing list > > [email protected] > > http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug > > > _______________________________________________ > PLUG mailing list > [email protected] > http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug > _______________________________________________ PLUG mailing list [email protected] http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
