This looks like a bug in Mate Terminal for Fedora 43.
In Fedora Mate Terminal, you can change the the screen title option using:
Edit | Profile Preferences | Title and Command
“When terminal commands set their own titles:” ==> Replace Initial Title
After setting this option in F42 and earlier, you can “su” to another user, or “ssh” to another system and the title is replaced, so you can easily see the “user@host” for that terminal window. When you exit that session (e.g.: with Ctrl-D or exit), the terminal title changes back to the previous title, which reflects the earlier user@host correctly.
After using the dnf offline upgrade to Fedora 43 Mate-Compiz, this is not working properly anymore – when you su or ssh to another session, the title changes correctly, but when you exit that shell session, it does not change back. The title still shows the session that you were previously connected to and exited.
This is a nusiance when you have multiple terminal windows open, as you have to look at the window contents to determine which host session that you are currently in.
I have noticed this behavior in multiple F43 Mate systems.
Summary:
Works fine in F42 mate-terminal-1.28.1-4.fc42.x86_64
Incorrect behavior in F43 mate-terminal 1.28.1.9.fc43.x86_64
It is not up to us. The mate project got updated last, almost 2years ago (in 4 month).
Unfortunately that makes this Desktop slowly an endangered dinosaur.
The big brother of Mate, the gnome desktop uses pytaxis sudo dnf install ptyxis. You could try to give this emulator a try.
There is also a xfce-terminal you could test. sudo dnf install xfce4-terminal it is almost 10 month newer
Xfce 4.20 released
Dec 15 2024
After almost two years of work, we are happy to announce the release of Xfce 4.20 !
Since Xfce 4.18 a lot of major development happened. Our team added many nice new features, did a gazillion of bug fixes and did various minor improvements. Finally, all that was released for your pleasure.
This ins’t a problem with MATE Terminal. Under F43 the title management still works if you ssh into non-F43 systems (F42, RHEL, etc.). Terminal title and prompt management seems to have issues in F43, but it’s not specific to MATE.
Even better. There was an issue already someone related when we installed F42. In Ptyxis it was the “Preserve Working Directory” option. So instead of displaying the new location it was going there where the last open session was.
As I also proposed, trying other terminals, to see if something changes.
I’ve tried under MATE Terminal, xterm, GNOME Terminal, and ptyxis. The described behavior is identical on all except ptyxis.
ssh to other non-Fedora 43 hosts changes terminal tabs and window title to match host, directory, and login as expected.
ssh to other Fedora 43 hosts leaves terminal tabs and window title set to original strings.
The exception - ptyxis - does append the new host, directory, and login to the original title. Apparently this is a design choice, as there’s no option to replace the titles or prepend the relevant info to the titles.
I can only conclude whoever broke title and prompt management between Fedora 42 and 43 only tested with ptyxis.
