Desktop

Last week I upgraded my Linux Mint 18 MATE desktop distro to 18.3. With the massive progresses GNU/Linux has done in the desktop, those kind of upgrades use to be simple tasks and no more hassle is to be expected. Except this time where I had several a GUI-related annoyances.

1. MATE panel transparency

I recently became addicted to /r/unixporn and made myself a shiny modern desktop made of MATE and rofi. This desktop use the Arc-Darker theme which used to work nicely with mate-panel version 1.14 but was messing transparency with version 1.18, the one shipped with Mint 18.3.

A while ago, I had my ${DAYWORK} workstation running NetBSD, and honestly, it did pretty well. Things began to become more painful when there was no more DRI acceleration with the radeon driver, it then did an okay-ish job, but the overall desktop became somewhat laggy.

It was told someone was working on porting KMS/GEM, that was more than a year ago, and as of today, that work -and I guess it is not an easy one- isn’t mature enough to be used as a workstation, I need my desktop to run various tools, and not only terminal-based ones.

A while ago, I had my ${DAYWORK} workstation running NetBSD, and honestly, it did pretty well. Things began to become more painful when there was no more DRI acceleration with the radeon driver, it then did an okay-ish job, but the overall desktop became somewhat laggy.

It was told someone was working on porting KMS/GEM, that was more than a year ago, and as of today, that work -and I guess it is not an easy one- isn’t mature enough to be used as a workstation, I need my desktop to run various tools, and not only terminal-based ones.