MATE

A continuation of the GNOME 2 desktop.

MATE forks the codebase of GNOME 2, which was abandoned when GNOME 3 was released in 2011. It preserves the classic panel-with-applets desktop experience while gradually modernising the underlying components: GTK 3 port (then GTK 4 in progress), systemd integration, and pieces of the broader modern Linux desktop stack.

The MATE name is a deliberate tribute to yerba mate, the South American beverage. The project preserves the familiar GNOME 2 applications under new names (Caja file manager, Pluma editor, Eye of MATE image viewer, Atril document viewer) to avoid collisions with their GNOME 3+ successors that took the original names.

MATE is a popular choice for users who didn't get along with GNOME 3's Activities-overview model and for older hardware that GNOME Shell taxes. It is the default desktop on Ubuntu MATE, Linux Mint MATE edition, and several smaller distributions, and remains in active development with regular releases.

License: GPL-2.0-or-later

Category: Desktop

Website: https://mate-desktop.org/

Install

Debian/Ubuntu: sudo apt install mate-desktop-environment
Fedora/RHEL:   sudo dnf install @mate-desktop
Arch:          sudo pacman -S mate

Authors

MATE development team

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