[pantalaimon]

The sad part is that Gnome 2 had a whole ecosystem of third party software that integrated with it. Just a few of that got ported over to Mate (usually just s/GNOME/MATE/g) but it never gained the same traction.

[Wowfunhappy]

Why did it need to be ported at all? Shouldn't it "just work"?

[pantalaimon]

Mate had to change all “Gnome” strings to “Mate” so both could be packaged/installed in parallel and probably also for legal reasons.

This means all DBus interfaces need to use the new name, a nautilus plugin must now call caja functions instead and so on.

[Wowfunhappy]

...huh, well that's frustrating! Could this be solved with a basic compatibility layer?

[mycall]

or decompile, touch strings, then recompile.