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

[Tony Baechler]

On 5/22/2016 3:13 AM, Samuel Thibault wrote:
> 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. Ideally we'd just say "pick whatever,
> they're all good").


I haven't tried Gnome 3 since shortly after it was released. I understand 
some of the issues have been addressed. I found it very confusing. With MATE 
and Windows, pressing Tab after I'm logged in should eventually get me to a 
desktop, menu or something useful but it doesn't. I think I was in Gnome 
Shell which had no speech. If I press the Super key, I think I land in a 
search area, but I could be thinking of Unity. I still have no obvious way 
of selecting what app to run. Pressing other random keys didn't seem to 
help, so I gave up. With Gnome 2, I had no problems at least navigating the 
desktop. I could press Tab and the arrows which would at least get me to the 
file explorer. Alt-F1 lands me in a menu which I can arrow through. I'm not 
saying that Gnome 3 must have a menu interface, but it would be helpful to 
have all installed apps in a list which can be navigated with the arrows and 
doesn't require guesswork to find. Since we're using Super-S to turn on the 
screen reader, maybe make it present a simplified interface with such a list 
available by pressing Tab after Orca comes up.