Book Image

Linux Mint Essentials

By : Jay LaCroix
Book Image

Linux Mint Essentials

By: Jay LaCroix

Overview of this book

A task-oriented look at Linux Mint, using actual real-world examples to stimulate learning. Each topic is presented in an easy-to-follow order, with hands-on activities to reinforce the content. If you are starting out with Linux from a different platform or are well versed with Linux Mint and want a guide that shows you how to exploit certain functionality, this book is for you. No previous Linux experience is assumed.
Table of Contents (17 chapters)
16
Index

Introducing MATE

MATE (pronounced Mah-Tay) is a desktop environment available for Linux. Although Mint ships a special release of their distributions which opts for MATE instead of Cinnamon, MATE is by no means limited to Linux Mint. It is what we refer to as a fork in the Linux world. Essentially, a fork is where a developer or group of developers takes an existing project and creates a different project from it. In some cases, a forked project may be very similar to the original, but over time, it becomes its own project altogether.

The origin of MATE goes back to when the third major version of GNOME was released. Although GNOME 3.x has come a long way since its inception, a lot of users were less than enthused with the changes in GNOME 3.x over that of GNOME 2.x. MATE is appealing to those who prefer the older 2.x releases of GNOME over the newer 3.x series. In addition, MATE generally runs better on older hardware, and may be appealing to users who don't prefer a great deal of...