A few days ago the beta for Linux Mint 22 was approved for release, and while it hasn’t been officially announced yet I downloaded it off one of the mirrors to take a look at over the weekend. But not the usual Cinnamon edition, or the XFCE edition (which I use on my Chromebook). I wanted to look at the MATE edition, which I’ve never given any love to at all. And, since I had a spare SSD in a drawer, I threw it into a machine and installed it Saturday morning.
(It was a mentally exhausting week at work. I needed to exercise different mental muscles.)
MATE is based on GNOME 2, and while out of the box the Mint team styles it to look a lot like Windows, I decided I’d style Mint 22 MATE to look like GNOME 2.
It took about forty minutes, and I had myself a GNOME 2-ish Linux Mint 22, as you can see above. A menu and notification bar at the top of the screen, an open window bar with workspace switcher at the bottom. And when I overlay my Mint 22 with a VM of Ubuntu 8.04 on GNOME 2…
…they’re essentially the same user experience. Colors are different, icons are different, but functionality? The same. Sixteen years difference, yet not different.
I set up Mint 22 with the SSTP and remote desktop software I need for work and got those configured. Then I experimented with Compiz effects, which was not something I’d ever explored before.
On the oblique side, that’s the remote desktop opened to work. That’s a really cool effect. Useful? Maybe not. Fun to look at? Hell yeah.
I think I’ll keep this around.