Wayne D's Blog

Wondering why my Centos 8 system was behaving so badly tonight, being unresponsive to clicks and acting like it was swapping I fired up top. Top showed me that gnome-shell was quite frequently using 100% cpu. The bad behavior of gnome 3 on this machine has become more of an issue as it's the machine I took home from work to use during the Coronavirus lockdown.

I've was never a fan of gnome 3 and the Classic mode just hides all the ugliness behind an old user interface. I have searched Google on and off over the months, waiting for a prebuilt, rpm based Mate to to be available for Centos 8. The first result Google returns is a page that walks you through compiling mate from source. I might have resorted to that but why reinvent the wheely when someone else might have the done the work already. Luckily reddit user https://www.reddit.com/user/stenstorp/ came to the rescue of frustrated Centos 8 by putting up a repo where you can get the rpm's to install Mate on Centos 8.

I followed his instruction at https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/stenstorp/MATE/ , rebooted the my machine and in 10 minutes I was using Mate.

Thanks again stenstorp.

If mate isn't your thing he has also ported the minecraft launcher, the budgie desktop and lightdm to Centos. Check out his repo at https://copr.fedorainfracloud.org/coprs/stenstorp/MATE/