Axios Myself I just dont have issues with it Does everything I want.
Obviously you and I are trying to use the OS differently. I'm very happy that it works well for your needs. And keep in mind that I don't have anything against MATE, it's just that Budgie, Gnome, and Plasma will all connect with my NAS using the smb protocol (Samba) that lets Linux machines talk with Windows machines remotely. Smb is how Windows servers talk with each other, and with the workstations in a workplace.
All I need to do is click on the Network link in that DE's file manager. It even works for distros that I can't get to connect using the Linux native nfs protocol. (My NAS supports both, so in a mixed workplace, it can support Windows and Linux computers.) But why is a NAS so important to some folks, like me, for instance?
My NAS (network attached storage) is important to me, because it holds family pictures, music, movies, documents, downloads, source repositories, ebooks, backups, and more -- that I've collected over decades. It's a little Linux server in a case with four huge disks (10 TB each) in a RAID array. At this point, it's about half full. It communicates with every machine here (hardware and virtual), so that they don't need to store all that data themselves.
And that happens to be where some of the software I use to configure systems resides, So when I create a VM, or when I buy a new computer, it's important for me to be able to connect it with my NAS. Not everyone needs to be able to do that, but I do. And when a system makes it difficult or impossible to do that, I say so.
And with Budgie, GNOME, and Plasma VM's, I can share certain resources with the host machine the VM is running on, like the clipboard, files, or USB ports. I keep a set of files that I use to configure a new machine on a USB drive. I did that originally so that I could set up identical classroom computers without the need for a network, but I've also found it useful even outside of the classroom.
With Budgie, GNOME, and Plasma VMs, their file managers will automatically mount a USB drive that I've inserted in a port on the host machine. It's a feature of VirtualBox VMs, but MATE doesn't take advantage of it. At least not that I've found so far. It's the TRANSFERS that's mounted in the file manager, like in this shot of Nemo in my Budgie VM.
The issue of the rectangles instead of application icons in the display of virtual desktops is an interesting one. Plasma, for example, displays, by default, empty rectangles that show the approximate size and shape of the windows running on that desktop. But if you right-click on one of them and choose to configure the Workspace Switcher widget (a.k.a. Pager), the first setting in the list is the one that displays application icons instead. Some DEs, like MATE, don't have that setting, but simply display the application icons all the time -- or rather, sometimes. As you can see, it appears to be selective in MATE's case, as some apps appear as rectangles and others show up as icons. The rest of the applications that appear as icons in other DEs just show up as the rectangles I mentioned. Here's a better look at them.
From left to right, these represent Thunderbird, Vivaldi, Spider solitaire, Shisen-sho, Mahjongg, Settings, Caja, and the MATE terminal. I don't know why the terminal displayed as an icon yesterday, but not today. Thunderbird and Vivaldi are apps that I installed from the repository using eopkg, but so are Spider, Shisen-sho, and Mahjongg. The others are native to MATE. So I don't know how it decides to display icons for some and outlines for the others.
This has been a long message, but I wanted to explain why I mention whether a distro supports a NAS, or its DE works in ways that work for me. As I said in the beginning, I have nothing at all against MATE, if it does everything its user wants and needs. I could even live with it if I had to. But with Solus, I don't have to. Also, I hope it's clear why I appreciate a distro or DE that makes it easy for me to access my NAS, whether by smb or nfs. And I love that many will work with VirtualBox so that a VM can access its host's resources.
My goal yesterday was to get four Solus .ISO files installed on VMs, and minimally configured as a useful daily driver. I'll likely be using them differently over the coming days, and I'll certainly be doing more configuration. Maybe if I install the VirtualBox guest additions for the MATE DE, it will be able to access more of the host's resources, for example. I haven't needed to do that with any of the other DEs.
