The Mate is the traditional desktop environment as it is built up with Gnome2. Every Linux distribution is made up of Gnome. The Mate is purely based on Gnome 2 and continue to use Gnome 2. This makes it the Linux Mate as one of the best lightweight operating systems. It provides numerous customizations and configurations.
You can easily customize the Mate with a few simple settings.
Customizing Interface
To change the interface of Mate, you can make use of default theme options. All you need is to right click on the desktop to open the context menu and select the option “Change Desktop background”. Open “Theme” and click on the “customize” button. It will open the theme customization menu.
Find the “controls” tab and browse the installed themes, each theme has its own user interface and other settings. All you need is to choose a theme and close the window. It will instantly change the theme of Linux.
Customize Window Border
In case you want to customize the window border, you need to go to the appearance area using the desktop context menu and choose the “Change Desktop Background” button.
Click the customize button and find the Window Border tab. This tab allows the users to customize all the window manager themes options. You can perform different experiments to change what suits the environment.
Customizing the Icons
Icons are the most important thing the look and feel depends upon, you need to choose the icons wisely as if you choose a bad icon pack, it will mess up with your desktop.
Open the icon settings from the desktop context menu and select Change Desktop Background. Choose customize to open the customizations and find icon settings. In the icons section, you can choose from a set of available icons. It will automatically apply settings to the whole desktop.
To get new icons, go through the icons theme section, using gnome-look.org and get new icons.
Customizing the Panel
The top panel holds the application menu, shortcuts, system tray and others and the bottom panel contains windows list i.e. program switcher and more. If you want to add new panel widgets, right click on the panel and click on “add to panel” button to add new widgets to the panel. It is also possible to delete the existing widgets by right clicking on the panel and choose “remove from panel”. You can also create new panels and remove the existing panels.
Customizing the Panel Settings
The Mate comes up with numerous powerful set of customizations, adjust right click on the panels and select the properties. There are different tabs with numerous customizations for various objects. Change the size of the panel as well as change the location and orientation.
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