Fedora 20 with Mate DE and Mint Menu

For those of you who have been following my Linux posts, you know that I have been a Fedora user since February of 2005 with Fedora Core 3. I tried Ubuntu from time to time but always had problems. However in the middle of last year 2013 I moved to Ubuntu based Linux Mint 15 preferring it over Fedora 19. For some reason I couldn’t figure out the Fedora 19 installer correctly. When it did install Fedora 19, my files on my user account were inaccesable. I didn’t get the home partition correct. I tried Linux Mint 15 instead and it installed without a hitch.

Linux Mint 15 worked very well for me. But after I upgraded to version 16, suddenly I had problems. I couldn’t install any 32 bit apps on my 64 bit system! They worked fine on Linux 15! Specifically those apps were Wine and Skype. Without Wine I cannot run two Windows programs I need that have no Linux counterpart. I could live without Skype on my PC because I can use it on my Google Android tablet, but I wanted Wine back. The Linux Mint application installer (apt-get) kept giving me error messages of unmet dependencies. None of the advice on the Linux Mint forum about how to fix the problem worked. And I couldn’t even get Acrobat Reader on Linux Mint 16! It aborted in a error message

The Fedora Linux 20 installer worked well, and all my favorite applications are now back including Acrobat Reader! Fedora always seemed more complete, more polished, and more stable.

I tried to use the Mate DE in Fedora 18, but it was buggy. This version of Mate works well now and I could even install the useful Mint Menu in it as you can see from the photograph. I had to use a camera to take the screenshot showing the Mint Menu because the screenshot application does not work with the menu open.

Move to Gnome 3 from Mate!

Update on Feb. 2, 2014: The Mate desktop environment GUI stopped loading for some reason. I logged into the standard Gnome 3, began to use it and started to like it! When Gnome 3 first came out I absolutely hated it. Either the Gnome developers improved it, or perhaps because I’ve been also using a Google Android tablet for the past half year, I now understand better the reasoning behind the now Gnome interface. I think its simpler and cleaner looking than Mate having no Desktop icons or complicated menus. And I can switch between open windows faster than I could before. I feel comfortable with it and can actually do some real work using it.

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