Using openSUSE search for packages i have discovered by accident that a Mate desktop repo somehow exists and it was created by Ketheriel: Index of /repositories/home:/ketheriel:/m8
My question is this: will an official Mate desktop repo be created for openSUSE users any time soon ? 
So I have no answer to your question, but for any one wondering what this is about is Mate is a fork of the old Gnome 2 desktop, now abandoned and replaced with Gnome 3. If you wish for the old Gnome 2 desktop, Mate may be the answer to your prayers. In addition here are some more links:
Repository: “http://download.opensuse.org/repositories/home:/ketheriel:/m8/12.1/”, add as new repository without the quotes in YaST…
Main Web Site: MATE | The traditional desktop environment
Wiki: MATE (desktop environment) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Thanks creatura85 for pointing this out. Be aware I have NOT tried out the new desktop, so install it at your own risk. Since it is compiled with openSUSE 12.1, its got a chance it will work, but be aware that its possible to mess up your current openSUSE install on anything new such as this.
If you do install it, please come back and inform us of your success…
Thank You,
Morning Jdmcdaniel3 i have tried to install Mate from that repo and i did not worked for me; the desktop fails to load because a “sanity-check” fails and after i press OK at that error nothing else loads.
I wonder if you load the gnome3 desktop and then try to load Mate, what you might get? I may give that a try in a VM and see what it does. Since we got no announcement about Mate that I have seen, this may just be work in progress, not ready for prime time, as they say.
Thank You,
I have succesfully launched MATE from this repo, although you have to do:
mkdir /etc/mateconf/mateconf.xml.defaults /etc/mateconf/mateconf.xml.mandatory /etc/mateconf/mateconf.xml.system
in order to pass the sanity check. However, the build is from 22 Feb and it lacks a lot of mateconf settings (some of them are /usr/share/mateconf/schemas/*.schemas). Still immature.
Thanks for the info and help rugbygangster. I thought I saw where Linux Mint was being released with Mate version 1.2 and so perhaps we will end up with the same here. It would be nice if someone kept and eye on this and let us know when it was ready for prime time usage. That could be helpful to a lot of us here.
Thank You,
rugbygangster: yes you are right still immature, maybe in the future the repo will get to a stable version so we can test it and see how it behaves under openSUSE.
It looks nice under Linux Mint its like having Gnome2, so Mate 1.2 is the “landmark” for developing Mate for openSUSE users.
Good people…
First of all, thanks for using my test repository… It doesn’t work and it got nuked yesterday! But… MATE testers will be welcome to test the integration I’m doing for MATE in GNOME:Cinnamon:MATE, which is meant to work…
Now… A lot of stuff was updated to 1.2 and 1.3 (you only get more bleeding edge from GIT builds)… Most of the stuff has been normalized, but there’s extensive testing to do… WITH THE CURRENT FEATURES… No wish lists or new features until this MATE is thing is stabilized.
The current packages on GNOME:Cinnamon:MATE are using openSUSE Metacity as window manager, so a few things will not work correctly, but this has a purpose! So we can use the new compiz builds from Kai 
Open Bugs through the project bug report button… because I come to this forum 1 or 2 times a month