Debian 8.7 to 9 transition and MATE issues [Edited]

[TonyT]

GTK3 did break older GTK3 themes, the Adwaita theme in Stretch MATE is solely GTK2.
I made a GTK3 Adwaita-like theme for Stretch MATE by hacking TraditionalGreen GTK3 theme.
http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=132184

[prppedro]

If I was were in your place, and Stable was working just fine, I'd just install the MATE Stretch in a Virtual Box VM. It's actually not very difficult at all, as far as my experience goes.

Like I say, always, "there's things we learn only by empiricism"... Taking dist-upgrade with a grain of salt seems to be one of these things. Nevertheless, perks are part of the Linux world. Perhaps they teach us more than the secure VM environment. hahaha

GTK3 did break older GTK3 themes, the Adwaita theme in Stretch MATE is solely GTK2.
I made a GTK3 Adwaita-like theme for Stretch MATE by hacking TraditionalGreen GTK3 theme.
http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=132184

Seems like an okay job for me. But Adwaita was never my favourite theme. I'm using TraditionalGreen for now, and I think it's pretty okay.

--

But, for an way or another, I'd consider that thread as solved. MATE 1.16 is here. And the rest of the system will soon be fine after some manual fixes.

[stevepusser]

And now that the gtk 3-only MATE 1.18 is out, we can now start calling 1.16 stale. Though if one was to backport it, it could be much easier to do on Stretch. I don't know if it will take a while to show up in Sid, since developers are dedicating a lot of effort to get Stretch out now.

[prppedro]

It's an interesting thing. After all, they had such goal since the very begining.

GTK 3 seems to still have an entire way ahead... If, of course, GTK team stops doing thinks like GTK 3.20. MATE will stick to it for a good time, so seems like we aren't going to face difficulties for at least the next year. But we can't tell... MATE is in very active development and they may decide to kill backward compatibility for new features. Then, backports may function, but not that well, as MATE relies in a bunch of libraries and GTK to an whole bunch others. I wish it were easy to backport as, IDK, Apache is. It relies in a dozen of libraries and it's done. And it won't care if they date back to 1972.