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MATE: nice modern desktop.

I've been using MATE as my desktop environment(DE) for a week now, and I must admit it has become my second favorite DE after Cinnamon.


As you can see, I like to keep my desktop itself rather clean. Yet, MATE feels rather snappy and it looks rather good for my tastes. It really makes me feel nostalgic about the all GNOME, but at the same time it makes me feel good about having a nice modern option.

The personalization options out of the box are not all that many, but it you can get many more if you want. Yet, if you want to get your hand dirty you can go to their home page, or wiki, to help them out or just get some nifty options to make your desktop ever more of your liking.

Personally, one of the best selling points for MATE is the fact that there is an official Ubuntu distro shipping with it as its default DE: Ubuntu MATE. Ubuntu is one of my favorite Linux distros, so having the option of installing with MATE as default to begin with is the way to go for me. Though, it has some competition from Linux Mint when I've to decide what distro to install.

I got to say, if you really liked GNOME 2 or just like some kind of retro look for your DE, MATE is the way to go.

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