UPDATE 11/11/2012:
I’ve been told that the repo is back up. I’ve also been made aware that the Dropbox repo and the repo included in Fedora conflict and can make the desktop unusable. Please consult #fedora-mate for help if you plan on moving from one repo to the other.

Original Post:
It’s been brought to our attention that the Fedora repo that is hosted on Dropbox no longer works due to an excessive amount of bandwidth being used. We are now directing users to use the official Fedora repo now. For instructions on using this repo, please consult our wiki page located here.

For more information about MATE’s official inclusion in Fedora, see this page.

If you have any questions regarding moving from one repo to the other, please ask for help in #fedora-mate on irc.freenode.net. As always, general MATE questions can be asked in #mate.

Recently, Clement Lefebvre of Linux Mint has had discussions with the developers of Geany about possibly creating a lightweight version of Geany (we’ll call it Geany Lite in this post). At this point, Geany Lite is nothing more than an idea and it’s unknown whether or not this idea will come to fruition, so please keep that in mind while reading this post. So far, the only differences between Geany and Geany Lite that have been discussed are the default hiding of UI features that are more suited for developers than users seeking a lightweight text editor. You can follow the discussion on the Geany mailing list here (October) and here (November).

The point of this post is to provide a brief overview of why we thinking dropping Pluma in favor of Geany Lite would be a good change and to determine how our users feel about this. If you feel strongly about whether or not we should make this change, now is your chance to let your opinion be known. If we receive a strong negative reaction, we will not go through with it.

The main reason we are interested in using Geany Lite as the default text editor for MATE is that it will receive significantly more attention from developers than Pluma will. The MATE team is very small and maintains a very large number of packages, so we can’t guarantee that Pluma will receive the attention it deserves every release cycle. Since Geany has its own dev team that is independent of MATE, our users would be getting a text editor that is consistently being improved and bug fixes would be released in a more timely fashion. We believe that adopting Geany Lite in place of Pluma would provide our users with the best possible experience going forward.

Please respond to this post with your feelings (positive or negative) regarding this potential change. Again, Geany Lite is just an idea and it’s possible that it never comes into existence. In order to make it easier for use to sort through user feedback, we will not be approving comments that are unrelated to this topic.

Feel free to stop by #mate on irc.freenode.net to discuss the idea further.