Tag: Desktop

I love you, MATE!

Three seconds after switching to MATE Desktop, I am in love.  It’s been a long while now that I’ve been trying to get used to Gnome 3, gave up, switched to KDE 4, which is better, but nowhere near as good as Gnome 2.  All of a sudden, all those distant memories of a useful, stable, working desktop environment which is completely out of your way are a reality again.

mate

 

I’ve only done it on my home laptop for now.  But with positive feelings that strong, I think my work laptop will be switched over on Monday.   Huge thank you goes to both everyone who made Gnome 2 an awesome desktop and those who forked the MATE.  Please keep it up!

Fixing screen resolution on Linux with xrandr

Not the best start of the week today.  For some weird reason my desktop’s screen resolution crashed into a safe 1024×768 mode today.  No updates, no changes in configuration, not even a reboot – just in the middle of the working morning.  I’ve tried to fix it to no avail, installed updates, and even rebooted.  Nothing seemed to help.  Google to the rescue, and I find this handy page that shows step by step how to use xrandr to fix things.  I knew about xrandr for a few years now, but it’sbeen decades since I had to use it, so I’m rusty.  15 seconds later I have the following script ready:

#!/bin/bash

#gtf 1280 1024 60
xrandr --newmode "1280x1024_60.00"  108.88  1280 1360 1496 1712  1024 1025 1028 1060  -HSync +Vsync
xrandr --addmode VGA1 1280x1024_60.00
xrandr --output VGA1 --mode 1280x1024_60.00

Run it once and all is back to normal. In fact, after a few minutes in 1024×768 mode, it feels like I have a better monitor now than I used to. They say, you need to lose something to really appreciate what you have. Until today I thought I had a crappy old monitor. But just a few minutes in a lower resolution make me appreciate it a lot now.

Gnome3 Tutorial

Here is one solid piece of advice I can give you after spending way too much time tweaking Gnome 3 in the last few days: read this Gnome 3 tutorial.  Don’t just scroll through it.  Read every single word of it.  It will save you a lot of time and hair pulling.  I promise.