That is precisely why we gave Cent 8 a pass.
Nosencical desk top and it inability to run a number of Engineering
application.
I ran Libre office fine but nothing else.
So unless you are a word smith it basically useless.

We are going to upgrade servers to 6.9 and a workstations to 7.6 and
hold our breath for the next 4 years.

So far we have evaluated a lot of Linux varients and most were pretty
bad.  Nice to tinker with but basically not industrial.
They show that the developers have never worked in industry or had to
bild and maintain a large number of assemblies.

Our current leap back is to BSD !!!
And that falls into the category of desperated measures by deperet men.

Every time I look around a couple of Windows laptops we leave on line
are constantly being upgraded and the upgrade fails and THEN ???

Given the mixed state of Linux and DUMB desktops and infinite mouse
clicks to do simple stuff.  Industrial development will continue to be
Windows only.   The Linux community is constantly shooting themselves in
the foot and sometimes higher.

Red hat was a good stable platform prior to 7 and then the kids took
over and you have a video game.  Not good.  Where do we go from here?

So the world will migrate to a Chinese tablet or telephone and computers
for industrial and engineering will disappear.  If you look at the
slippery slope we will slip back into the dark ages of DOS and Assembly.
There will not be enough of market for engineering and scientific
computers to make the high volume low cost possible.

So much for negative stuff.
A university group or government lab in the US should offer a New SL and
maintain it.  The gate keeper should keep it in US English.  And please
no more cheese Icons.

Larry Linder

On Tue, 2020-05-19 at 16:44 -0700, Keith Lofstrom wrote:
> I still haven't learned how to tweak Gnome 3 so it looks
> and operates like Gnome 2. 
> 
> I dislike video games, which most user desktops seem to
> be evolving towards.  I dislike icons replacing text;
> I learned to read decades ago, and I can't grep icons.
>  
> I use Mate (a gnome 2 clone with gnome 3 underneath)
> for my large-screen SL7 systems; works OK. 
> 
> I've done my feeble best to compile Mate for CentOS 8; my
> result is not completely broken, but not ready for use.
> Some of the graphics fails.  "Mate8" seems to leak memory.
> 
> Mate character rendering (SL7 and C8) is fuzzy, just like
> all gnome3 character rendering.  No big deal on a 4K*X
> pixel screen, quite a problem on a portable 1K*X pixel
> screen.  Xterm renders fine, as sharp as gnome2, but
> xterm isn't as versatile as gnome2- and mate-terminal.
> 
> Are there other Gnome2/Mate dinosaurs on this list?
> 
> Perhaps we can combine efforts so the gaping holes in our
> understanding don't completely overlap.  If nothing else,
> perhaps we can develop a list of setup steps to disinfect
> gnome3 and make it smell less gamy.  
> 
> Then we can go back to our research, and stop distracting
> others from their tweets, popup ads, and cute cat videos.
> 
> Keith
>