Fedora 18, Red Hat‘s community Linux distribution, may have an odd name, “Spherical Cow,” but with the GNOME 2.x fork, MATE, it may also be the most user-friendly version in years.
Fedora, a cutting-edge Linux distribution, has long been known for championing the unpopular GNOME 3.x Linux desktop interface. While GNOME is showing signs of returning to a friendlier interface, other old-style GNOME 2.x like interfaces such as Cinnamon and MATE have grown in popularity. Now Fedora’s developers, seeing which way the wind is blowing, is also supporting MATE.
According to the official Fedora MATE page, all of MATE’s packages have been approved and pushed to Fedora 18. The Fedora MATE project owner, Dan Mashal, stated, “MATE is a traditional Gnome 2 like desktop user interface. Many users have expressed interest in this feature since Fedora 15 in which Fedora was switched from Gnome 2 to Gnome 3.