When the Gnome team abandoned the traditional desktop style many people were frustrated and started looking for alternatives. Some went towards lighter DEs such as XFCE & LXDE while others migrated to KDE. Then the Linux Mint team came up with a fork of Gnome 2 and called it MATE. I had tried MATE on Linux Mint when it was initially released. It was good and kept it’s promise of giving back the traditional desktop experience. However since then MATE hasn’t been adopted by many large distributions although it’s been a stable project.

A few days earlier I saw an email by Stathis Iosifidis announcing the release of MATE for openSUSE. This had captured my attention and I gave it a try last night.

Stathis has made a nice wiki page describing the project. The availability of YaST’s one-click install buttons make installation a lot easier.

If you’re using Firefox you can click on the links below to install the corresponding package for your openSUSE version otherwise if you’re using Google Chrome or some other browser, right-click and save the .ymp file and run it locally.

– MATE Desktop for openSUSE 12.1
– MATE Desktop for openSUSE 12.2
– MATE Desktop for openSUSE 12.3
– MATE Desktop for openSUSE Tumbleweed

I initially ran openSUSE 12.3 XFCE installation on my laptop and then installed MATE for testing purposes. The end-product was a rock-solid desktop that reminded me of great hacking days. I think I’ll stick to it. :-)

Visit the openSUSE MATE Desktop page on Facebook to get more information.