MATE desktop

Raised as a usability problem by 12 people on Hacker News over 10 years (2016–2025), in 11 threads.

People raised many different problems with MATE desktop, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 13 complaints

Volume must be found through each app's own slider, which is too slow when needing a quick mute or adjust2025-11-03
Vertical taskbars put controls in a column, so buttons and text are not laid out horizontally as they should be2024-12-17
Windows and menus lag so badly that moving a window drops to a slideshow2022-12-12
Vertical taskbars don't work properly, rendering the panel broken and unusable2022-12-10
No easy way to change the accent color to a preferred one2021-11-05
Modal dialogs attached to parent window can't be dragged around the screen2020-02-12
Super key opens a broken menu where the user can't search or click items2020-02-11
Font scaling is wrong when switching between external monitor and laptop screen, requiring manual DPI changes2019-04-18
Video keeps playing after saving a word, forcing constant pausing to save several words2019-04-07
Chrome, Firefox and VSCode are unusable until client-side decorations are manually disabled2019-02-01
Programs are hard to find because you must hunt through menus2017-04-05
Desktop fails to start after GPU swap with no easy fallback or fix2016-04-16
Screens swap positions or become inaccessible after sleep, a frustrating experience2016-04-16