MATE (desktop environment)

Name

MATE is named after the South American plant yerba mate and tea made from the herb, mate. The name is stylized in all capital letters to follow the nomenclature of other Free Software desktop environments like KDE Plasma and LXDE. The recursive backronym "MATE Advanced Traditional Environment" was subsequently adopted by most of the MATE community, again in the spirit of Free Software like GNU ("GNU's Not Unix!"). The use of a new name, instead of GNOME, avoids naming conflicts with GNOME components.

History

Perberos, an Argentine user of Arch Linux, started the MATE project to fork and continue GNOME 2 in response to the negative reception of GNOME 3, which had replaced its traditional taskbar (GNOME Panel) with GNOME Shell. MATE aims to maintain and continue the latest GNOME 2 code base, frameworks, and core applications.

MATE was initially announced for Debian on November 8, 2013, at its official website.

MATE became an official Arch Linux community package in January 2014.

{{Anchor|MARCO}}Component applications

MATE has forked a number of applications which originated as GNOME Core Applications, and developers have written several other applications from scratch. The forked applications have new names, most of them from Spanish.

Development

MATE fully supports the GTK 3 application framework. The project is supported by Ubuntu MATE lead developer Martin Wimpress and by the Linux Mint development team:

New features have been added to Caja such as undo/redo and diff viewing for file replacements. MATE 1.6 removes some deprecated libraries, moving from mate-conf (a fork of GConf) to GSettings, and from mate-corba (a fork of GNOME's Bonobo) to D-Bus.

One of the aims of the MATE developers is to provide a traditional user experience while using the newest technologies. In MATE 1.20, which was released in February 2018, support for HiDPI was added and the GTK version got increased to 3.22. The MATE 1.22 release migrated many programs from Python 2 to Python 3 and from dbus-glib to GDBus. In an upcoming version, support for Wayland will be added. MATE 1.28.2 had greater support for Wayland, but did not provide a completely seamless fully native Wayland session yet.

Release history

Note that between each release, development versions are tagged with odd-numbered version numbers. These are not announced as official releases.

Adoption

The MATE website lists 27 Linux distributions and 5 Unix-like operating systems that support the MATE desktop environment.

It is available on the official repositories of only 22 of those Linux distributions.

Reception

MATE was praised for having a classic feel, with an "incredibly sharp" default theme and icon pack. In addition, it was praised for being lightweight within the Ubuntu MATE operating system, a version of the Ubuntu desktop that uses MATE as its primary desktop environment.

MATE has been praised for its speed and optimization being used dominantly on older machines. It has also been praised for its massive theming capabilities allowing users to also install themes.

The inclusion of GNOME Shell in GNOME 3 was a controversial decision. The users that preferred GNOME 2 have found MATE to be much more reliable for old-school users.

Beginner users have praised the simplicity of MATE coming from its similarities to the Microsoft Windows operating system, the MATE Welcome app and other factors.

References

References

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10. Wimpress, Martin. (February 7, 2018). "MATE 1.20 released".
11. (August 10, 2021). "MATE 1.26 released".
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13. (27 February 2024). "MATE 1.28 released". MATE.
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21. Wallen, Jack. (2025-07-12). "What Makes GNOME So Appealing?".
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23. Karapetsas, Stefano. (June 17, 2012). "What's new in next Caja". Stefano Karapetsas's Blog.
24. Karapetsas, Stefano. (January 3, 2012). "Undo/Redo in Caja". Stefano Karapetsas's Blog.
25. Laishram, Ricky. (August 4, 2011). "Linus Torvalds Ditches GNOME For Xfce". Digitizor.
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27. Lefebvre, Clem. (November 26, 2011). "Linux Mint 12 Release Notes". [[Linux Mint]].
28. Lefebvre, Clem. (December 1, 2011). "Important fix for MATE – Feedback needed". The [[Linux Mint]] Blog.
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