Really starting to appreciate .xsession-errors, it's helped me to fix a ton of small bugs, many that I didn't know existed.

But with Mate in general, I think it just likes to complain. Even in the current version I get a ton of errors from mate-session, mate-session-check-accelerated, mate-settings-daemon, marco, caja etc. all complaining about theme-parsing errors in the gtk-css.

In Openbox I get zero complaints about anything theme related. And I can't seem to narrow down what Mate has an issue with anywhere in the css, I have checked it through and through and updated where necessary and ran it through automated checkers as well, go figure.

Maybe the new version fixes some of that too, will find out hopefully by later today!

Good on older hardware too. And the older folks who I have converted to Linux over the years have overwhelmingly chosen it over other choices i've offered them.

I use it half the time, and Openbox the other half. It runs really well on Devuan, I think if more people tried it they would like it. So it's going to be one of my main focuses now that we are in testing season for new releases in the fall.

Mate's in the same boat as a lot of others, lack of developers and testers, so things take a while. Trying to learn more myself so I can help out better in the future, right now i'm just a user yelling at clouds, lol.

So the Debian Mate team had to fix the issue. Good news for you, and that Mike Gabriel caught up with gnome's latest revision PDQ.

But they will also have to add updated caja-common, libcaja-extension1, and libmate-desktop for it to work, and none of those are updated yet.

Update 4-13-25 Just checked and caja-common and libcaja-extension1 (1.26.4-1) are now in sid as well.

The errors come from a glib/gio file that was changed at some point, hardcoded in and no way gnome was gonna take it back. So the Mate guys had to patch Caja. But Debian still has the unpatched 1.26.3 version in both trixie and sid, but they are moving 1.26.4 in hopefully soon, there are some other libraries that need to be pushed as well to enable the new version, we may see a lot of new Mate packages come down the pipe.

ETA: Thank you Mike Gabriel at Debian, we do appreciate it!

Hmm ...
Good luck with that.  8^°

Last time I followed an issue here at Dev1, it required a Debian bug report, which I encouraged the author of the OP to file.

The reply was this:

* "won't fix" "get lost".

You may (or may not) want to consider reading the whole Dev1 thread and the Debian bug report to get an idea of the severity of the (properly investigated) problem the OP reported to see where any non-systemd bug report stands.

Best,

A.

@fanderal so you're thinking it's an issue that only manifests with certain themes?

I don't know. Found dbus GLib-GIO-CRITICAL errors in caja from 2016 in Arch. Found "Caja does not produce xsession errors" from caja on github from Jan 2022. And a glib-networking bug discussed in a GLib-GIO-CRITICAL bug report from Dec 2023.

Seems my view's limited as I've only seen those errors when trying a theme and testing apps from the terminal. The only repo theme I use is adwaita-dark (gnome-themes-extra pkg) to make it obvious when running the file mgr as root. All the other themes I've tried/used are GTK2/3 from *-look, pling and similar sites.

My current theme is Trinity GTK Theme. Except for two apps, no errors from any other GTK2/3 apps or with qt5ct for VBox. Exceptions are a single line from lxappearance: "GLib-CRITICAL: g_utf8_collate: assertion 'str1 != NULL' failed," and scriptfu-WARNING errors from gimp. I tested those two apps after setting the theme to gnome's adwaita-dark and got the same errors as the Trinity theme.

When I want a new desktop look, I'll download and test a dozen or more themes until I find one that works for me. My 'theme error theory' is from trying older GTK3 themes and seeing issues in app appearance and lots of errors in the terminal vs newer GTK3 themes and seeing no errors in appearance and few, if any, errors in the terminal. I've noticed this older vs newer theme issue for some time.

"Just delete the file and don't ever turn your machine off" is also not a great answer my friend.

Huh . . . When my tower suspends, it is quite dormant and power is off.

In any case, I don't even blame Mate/Caja for the issue in the first place, as fanderal pointed out earlier this seems like typical gnome-f***ery once again. Break GTK yet again and call it a feature and everybody else has to scramble to figure out fixes and workarounds.

Debian needs to update Mate, they just literally swapped from a working version in bookworm to a broken one in trixie. I'd file a bug report but they pretty much ignored the last one I filed. Filed anyway.

@golinux, don't know about your system, but here I can delete the file(s), but it re-spawns every time you re-boot or logout/logbackin.

That's what "suspend" is for. I can go for a VERY long time w/o having to reboot. 

@golinux, don't know about your system, but here I can delete the file(s), but it re-spawns every time you re-boot or logout/logbackin.

I'm gonna have to take down the test iso for now, this thing is nasty. Debian doesn't seem to want to update Mate to 1.28 like most of the major distros have done...don't know what to say about that, but going forward it's a major concern as just telling folks "hey be sure to delete .xsession-errors at the beginning of your session if you use Mate or else you could get fubar'ed" doesn't seem like it would go over well.

So I ended up resorting to having a size limit on the /home/.xsession-errors file.

I gave up on xsession-errors years ago. Whenever I update, I immediately delete that file because otherwise I may forget and it will grow to a gargantuan size. Doing so has never impacted performance that I have noticed.