Mate On CentOS 7

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I have been running Mate on CentOS 7 for some time but it does not work very well on my HiDPI laptop screen. Today I found that I am running version 1.16 of Mate whereas the current version is 1.22. Undoubtedly many of the issues have been fixed since 1.16 was released in 2016…

However, EPEL only provides 1.16 – a release from 2016 – and nothing later.

What is the recommended way to upgrade to 1.22?

19 thoughts on - Mate On CentOS 7

  • H wrote:

    It depends what you mean by ‘does not work very well’ …

    Without knowing what the problem is, it would be hard to say if a newer version may fix whatever the issue is

    As said elsewhere in this thread, there isn’t currently an EPEL
    maintainer for Mate, so you will have to look elsewhere

    I did come across https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/raveit65/Mate-GTK3/ a short while ago when I was looking for a possible ‘update path’ – but never got round to trying it out …

    I guess that if unless ‘someone’ takes on the maintainer role for
    Mate at EPEL, then there will be no upgrade path

    James Pearson

  • This is why I use GNOME on all my RHEL/CentOS desktops — its the only DE that gets any attention from Red Hat, and most likely to work.

  • No, definitely not. I use MATE on C7, because Gnome is, how do I
    say this politely…, um, horrible. Not a KDE fan either.

    Gnome-2.x wasn’t broken, didn’t need to be thrown away and replaced by something completely different.

  • …
    …

    Might the Fedora/Mate maintainer be approached for a recommendation of a CentOS/Mate maintainer?

    Jon

  • Not broken, but full of bugs that will never get fixed.

    I did a while back rebuild the EPEL rpms for 1.20. There are spec files I could make available but I can’t find the build environemnt setup now. It involves mock, a custom local repo to receive the fresh builds as you don’t want to pull in the rpms from EPEL, and a build script that defines the order, among other things. If I have time next week I can try and locate everything.

  • isdtor wrote:

    If Mate won’t be (or may not be?) supported by EPEL, has anyone looked at similar alternatives?

    I came across ‘Cinnamon’ (which is available from EPEL) – does anyone have experience of Cinnamon (good/bad/otherwise) ?

    Thanks

    James Pearson

  • I keep seeing posts about alternative desktops – great, just another of the things that make linux the OS of choice – you have choice; even about which desktop management system you wish to use.

    I have not tried mate for a number of years, it was quite simple and basic to use, but also lacked some of the polish we see in the market place, I have tried KDE and usually just use gnome, at whatever iteration RH and CentOS put out. KDE out of the box a year or so ago caused me some major grief to do with files and indexes and loosing disk space, so I walked away. Gnome has not been kind to developers like myself, and those trying to do real work with their work-stations –
    things that once were easy have become more difficult, however I have found solutions to most of the problems the later releases have introduced.

    Why bring this up? Well I guess I agree with some of the sentiment expressed often by a regular group of list contributors, but I also find it going stale.

    Change in the IT world is a constant. Not all of it is progress, in the sense of getting closer to a particular goal. However, it must be recognised that there are many, many different goals out there, and many of those will not be convergent, thus some gain, others loose.

    So at the end of the day, we make our choice, and live with the consequences. I am looking forward to spinning up CentOS 8 in the next month or two and seeing what that works like for my particular mix of tasks. It seems RH has chosen to support gnome desktop, thus for better or worse, that’s where I’ll go too. CentOS has far too many other benefits for me to go elsewhere.

    HUGE thanks to all the CentOS team and those that offer their experience to help and assist others – it makes my computing world function more or less reliably and deterministically, and all under my ability to observe and use.

    Thanks for reading, please forgive my slightly off topic rant.

    Rob

  • isdtor writes:

    I have done the hard lifting and rebuilt mate 1.22 on CentOS 7. It’s not without quirks, and I haven’t actually installed and tested, but I’m willing to make the srpms available – without any commitments. This might make a good addition to Nux :)

  • Good job and thanks, but I won’t add anything that overwrites EPEL. Can help with hosting it in a separate repo if you wish, though.

    –

  • The person responsible for packaging the mate RPMs for EPEL offered to hand that off to someone, which I considered (since I’m a Fedora/EPEL
    packager), but was reluctant to offer without understanding how much heavy lifting was involved.  Also, I wasn’t sure how much the mate on CentOS user community wants to stick with 1.16 vs. upgrade to 1.22. 
    What kind of “quirks” did you run into?

    -Greg

  • well, in theory I’d welcome a newer MATE, since I can’t stand Gnome 3.x. I’m using the epel versions and find them satisfactory, but I might be willing to build a testing VM and try a later version to see if I
    like it. and if I do like it would consider installing it on my “real”
    C7 system.

    Dunno if you find that encouraging or not, but at least it is honest.

    Fred

  • It would be great if Mate could be updated to the latest version! I am running it both on desktops and on a HiDPI laptop. On the latter, most things are sized incorrectly and I have not found a way to change things. If Mate is updated, I plan to install it on additional machines.

    Your effort would be most welcomed!

  • Greg Bailey writes:

    There’s basically two.

    I was building the packages under CentOS 7.5 with mock. One of the packages, mate-terminal, needs a newer version of vte291, i.e. the one from 7.6. No problem when building on 7.6+ (I hope – in process now).

    The other is that mozo now requires python >= 3.5. While I managed to get SCLo rh-python35 into the mock chroot and the appropriate commands into the spec file, it would still not build because the rpm script processing python files was looking for /usr/bin/python3.5. Rather than figure out how to do this in mock, I built the rpm outside mock in an “scl enable”‘d terminal and with /usr/bin/python3.5 a link to /opt/rh/rh-python35/…

    Other than that I think I had to update one patch because the source files changed, and create another because some construct in C code requires C99; but it was easy to rewrite for older C (I’m putting this one down to sloppy coding by mate developers). Some rpms required updated build reqs.

    All of this is relative to the 1.20 rpms I built back in December, which are in turn based on 1.16 from EPEL.