MATE chosen by default instead of gnome for blind people [Was: Debian Installer Stretch Alpha 6 release]

[Christian Schoepplein]

Hi,

On Sun, May 22, 2016 at 09:56:00PM +0200, Mario Lang wrote:
>Samuel Thibault <sthibault at debian.org> writes:
>
>> Cyril Brulebois, on Sat 21 May 2016 23:13:17 +0200, wrote:
>>>  * brltty:
>>>     - Install MATE desktop by default when brltty is used in d-i.
>>>  * espeakup:
>>>     - Install MATE desktop by default when espeakup is used in d-i.
>>
>> This change has triggered discussion on the debian-boot IRC channel. To
>> summarize, gnome people are surprised that MATE would be preferred by
>> blind people and wonder what they need to improve in gnome. I answered
>> that it was more a problem of general trend towards visual ways of
>> using the desktop, which can't be made really usable, but that's only a
>> sketchy answer, they need more precise examples.
>>
>> Could blind people here comment on this: why you don't use gnome and
>> prefer MATE instead? (or the converse of course, the idea is not to
>> blame gnome, we just want to select by default what is best for users,
>> according to their situation.

I'm using MATE for my daily job because I started with GNOME 2.x in the 
past and therefor it is more familiar to me than GNOME3. Maybe I should 
give GNOME3 a chance and see how things work, but to be honest I've 
heard nothing good about accessibility and I know some blind people 
switching from GNOME3 to MATE because they find it better and easier to 
use.

But I must also mension that I am no power user regarding to graphical 
desktops. I use MATE to work with Iceweasel, gajim, and mumble and 
sometimes pluma or writer and calc from the libreoffice package, 
without this tools I can't stay in contact with my colleagues, browse 
modern websites or quickly edit or read office documents, but the 
main work I still do inthe textbased terminal where I use mostly mutt 
for mailing and ofcourse ssh, vi and all the textbased linuxtools for 
the systemadministrative tasks I need to get done for my job.



Cheers,

  Christian

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