Getting this light and interesting desktop environment is quite easy

Aug 5, 2014 15:54 GMT  ·  By

openSUSE users will now have access to the MATE desktop environment after it has been made available in the official repositories.

The opeSUSE users can choose from a variety of desktop environments for their distros, but the most popular seem to be GNOME 3 and KDE. A few years back, GNOME developers decided to change the desktop paradigm and not everyone was happy. A lot of people still want that GNOME 2 desktop experience, and MATE is the solution.

“After GNOME 2.x passed the torch to GNOME 3, a lot of people started to wonder what is the perfect graphical user interface for them. Many users moved to Xfce, since it offers kind of a similar user experience to the late GNOME 2.x. But for those still fond of the GNOME 2.x environment, there is a fork of GNOME 2 available, and it's called MATE Desktop Environment.”

“The first MATE version available on OpenSuSE was the 1.6 incarnation, but recently the ever diligent openSUSE MATE team succeeded in adding MATE Desktop environment to Factory repositories. That means that next openSUSE version, 13.2, will include MATE Desktop officially!,” reads the announcement.

Installing MATE in openSUSE is actually quite easy. Users just have to use the one-click install ymp files from the MATE portal. Enjoy!