Re: [orca-list] Orca accessibility gnome vs MaTe

[Kyle <kyle4jesus gmail com>]

There are in fact some fundamental differences in the way you navigate
the two systems. For example, GNOME has no items on the desktop by
default, and you must tweak it to add a desktop to it. On the other
hand, MATE offers a desktop by default, which includes the Computer
entry that accesses disks and folders on the computer, your user home
folder, Trash and any folders or disks you have mounted, i.e. USB flash
drives, SD cards, external hard drives or connected networked folders.
MATE is composed of two panels and the desktop by default, where the
top panel contains a menu bar that lets you access system preferences,
applications and places. This panel also contains the notification tray
where some applications live, as well as a clock. The bottom panel
contains a window list and the workspace switcher primarily. You can
add applets to either panel. GNOME consists of the top bar, which is
somewhat similar to MATE's top panel, but does not have the menu bar,
includes the window list if I remember correctly, and system settings
are in a menu at the right side, the desktop is optional and is turned
off by default as I mentioned earlier. With the GNOME desktop turned
off, its portion of the screen is simply an empty space. You can get to
your applications using a shortcut that brings up something similar to
a grid of application buttons, and you can use the arrow keys to select
an application. Similarly, the top bar has an overview window that you
can bring up that will allow you to search for applications, files or
even some websites.

As for overall accessibility, I don't think there is much of a
difference between the two desktop environments, although I prefer MATE
personally, as it is just easier to use, probably because I'm more
familiar with the interface, as it is the same as the older GNOME
version 2.x and later version 3 interfaces, commonly called Flashback
and Fallback, and eventually duplicated somewhat in the regular GNOME
shell and called GNOME Classic. That said, there seems to be an easier
way to get to individual notifications and act on them in GNOME, which
doesn't appear to be available in MATE. Still, I find the GNOME system
as a whole to be harder to manage overall, again likely due to personal
preference.

Unfortunately, I did try to run GNOME recently, and found it very slow
and for all intents and purposes unusable on my machine. I'm not sure
if that happened because I did something wrong during installation, or
if this happened for another reason that is unclear to me. Either way,
I expect it is my problem somehow, as it certainly should have worked
better than it did, since my system resources are not that severely
limited. I did have a couple of different copies of Orca, and maybe the
wrong one was running, or maybe the problem is that I used lightdm as
my login manager instead of gdm, but I can't see how those should have
addected it. It must be something I missed during installation though,
because I have successfully used GNOME on less powerful machines than
what I have. In any case, it does come down to personal preference
usually, as most of the time both should work just fine, although I
wouldn't necessarily try running GNOME on an older single board
computer where MATE has far less trouble running.
~Kyle