About

What is MATE?

MATE is a fork of GNOME 2.
It provides an intuitive and attractive desktop to Linux users using traditional metaphors.

Gnome 2.32

Where does the name come from?

The name “MATE” comes from yerba maté, a species of holly native to subtropical South America. Its leaves contain caffeine and are used to make infusions and a beverage called mate.

Yerba Maté

Which distributions provide MATE?

MATE Community provides packages for a lot of other distributions. You can see the full list here.

73 thoughts on “About”

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  17. Hey Guys

    I would like to thank you for your great work, to keep Gnome 2 still alive.
    Iam using Linux for the last 3 Years and it kicked off my MacOS i had used for the last 15 Years.
    My greatest Problem with Linux is the Inconsistency of the Scene. Software who is running reliable over 10 Years, was given up in a few Mounths and was replaced with new ones.
    So go forward with this work and be strong…

    Greetigs from Germany

    Michi

    Reply ↓

    • Michi, the power of Linux also comes from that diversity you criticise … Linux offers a *choice* to the user. On MacOSX and Windows you have only one choice for the desktop, and that is it. Makes sense, because they can’t have enough people to support all desktops that Linux has, so they support only one.
      I also believe that also is why both Windows and MacOSX will always offer better desktop systems for business – because there is no single Linux desktop that has that many developers and Q&A teams, although some (GNOME and KDE) are close enough…

      Reply ↓

      • I don’t think Michi was critisizing the diversity, he was most likely talking about how, say, Ubuntu has dropped “old” packages in favor of Unity. He may not know that projects such as this one are common, to keep “old” interfaces alive that may not be supported by a major distribution, is all. It came as a shock to some users when Unity was released and they really were expecting a classic desktop. Good reason not to upgrade things without checking out the facts, is all.

        Reply ↓

        • Agreed Fixitmanarizona. Change for changes sake is not neccesarily moving forward. Gnome 2 worked fine for me and was able to deliver everything I needed from a desktop as a computer user – no more-no less. Why gild the lily? I will make a point trying out a Mate based distro in the near future.
          Yes, choice is better that just a single uniform product. However, sometimes when presented with myriad choices for ones needs it can get mind-boggling. That’s as true of operating systems as it is of supermarkets. (No disrespect intended to the Linux contributers – quite the opposite. The fruits of their voluntary work are awe-inspiring)

          Reply ↓

        • And what’s the advantage of “choice” when backward compatibilty is inexistent ? BTW Linux being just a kernel you might want to refine your definition of the “power of Linux”. Maybe one day when opensource companies will stop reinventing the wheel every single day and break everything we can see a nice desktop environment emerge for X11 (and honestly I don’t care if it’s Linux under the hood or FreeBSD or OpenIndiana, especially since some “Linux” community members just annoy me increasingly with their arrogance).

          Reply ↓

          • The day that free software developers stop “re-inventing the wheel,” and there is “one desktop to rule them all,” is the day that free software dies.

            If Aurelien wants only one desktop environment, then I suggest it puts its money where its mouth is and either develops one or gets fully behind the DE of its choice. If other people lose interest in that DE at some point, I’m sure Aurelien will get in there and help maintain it or pay others to do so.

            The state of free software is just fine as it is, and we don’t need some central committee to make choices for a DE for us. If people must have their choices made for them, they should probably buy a Mac or Windows.

            I see this kind of troll posting all the time, and they’re always trying to turn GNU/Linux into the equivalent of a Microsoft or Apple product. (Some actually say that they think GNU/Linux would be better off if Microsoft took it over.)

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  19. It is “mate” without accent and not “maté” with accent, as you wrote in the wikipedia link. I know because I drink mate every day of my life ;-)

    Reply ↓

    • It’s not a Spanish “é” (a tilde indicating the stress) but an English “‘é”, used in English to indicate that the “e” is not silent and must be pronounced, as in Pokémon (Pok-eh-MOHN, not POKE-mohn) and Beyoncé (be-john-SEH, not BE-johns). They spelled it “maté” to make sure English speakers pronounce it mah-TEH (as we Spanish speakers do) instead of MEIHT

      Reply ↓

        • In Brazilian Portuguese the ‘stress’ is not on ‘té’, but on the ‘má’. Although, that’s not a graphical stress, because it is written without it > MATE. I also drink lots of cold/ice mate and not ‘maite’ – English or ‘maté’ – Spanish. Whatever it is I can assure that it is a delicious drink
          :)

          Reply ↓

          • Yeah, I remember on the beaches in Rio vendors would walk up and down with carry-tanks of mate and lemonade. They would shout out “MATE!…..LIMAO!……”
            So yes, I’ve tried the tea – now for the desktop.

      • It’s not an English accent: English does not use accents. It could be a Spanish accent, but it is not a tilde. Tilde is the squiggle over ‘n’ to change it from “en” to “enye”. As used in Spanish, an accent here would move the stress from ‘ma’ to ‘te’. Without an accent, words ending in vowels are stressed on the penultimate syllable.

        Reply ↓

  20. I like mate ’cause it adds less bloat to the desktop. It seems widespread amongst developers, projects and os producers, that it’s good to use the power of new hardware and thus ignoring hardware in use. Some say: We have a fallback(gnome: gnome-fallback, ubuntu: unity2d), or you can switch off some effects, but that’s not really working well. It’s way to slow, to come even near the feeling to be happy using a current OS.

    Besides the other horrible things, as a Desktop-UI Windows 95 was quite cool stuff with lots of good points. It was fast! The main tool, the explorer was really fast, and that’s what I’d been missing since my switch Linux.

    Mate is usable even on not state-of-the-art hardware!

    Thanks!

    May you ever work for the codebloat staying away.

    Reply ↓

    • FreeBSD ships Gnome2 (and will ship it for a while, because of systemd and other Linux related dependencies of Gnome3).
      Why would you use Maté?

      Reply ↓

  22. Thank you so much for MATE, which I have installed in Ubuntu 12.04 LTS to replace Unity and Unity 2D as mydefault desktop environment!

    Reply ↓

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  28. I installed Mint Linux, added Mate and took the other desktops off. I really like Mate a lot better than I do Unity. I hope you are able to keep up the good work and I’m glad to have something like the good version of Gnome back again. I also like the use of gadgets and Mate has a very good staple of them. I was able to set up my desktop theme just as I like it and using Gartoon I’m very happy with it.

    Reply ↓

  30. I run 2 different Linux Mint 13 computers. My desktop machine has the KDE desktop simply because I need the PIC microcontroller IDE for “tinkering”
    with microcontroller hardware.

    My laptop machine has MATE as the desktop simply because it looks good, runs fast and isn’t full of clutter.

    Need I say I spend more time using my laptop machine?!

    Both desktops have their strengths and only KDE has weaknesses IMHO.

    Reply ↓

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  40. Imagine someone getting interested in trying linux, discovering mint, wanting to download it. Then there is an option, choosing a version with Mate or not. So, that person has to find out what Mate is. Clicks on the link taking him/her here. The answer: “MATE is a fork of Gnome 2.”
    HOW DOES THAT HELP?!?!?!?!?!?!
    You could as well have said that Mate was a knife of Troll 3…

    Reply ↓

  45. Wow!!! Keep up the good work guys!!!!! Gnome3 sucks. I was wandering wether the community will create any project to save Gnome2 and bring it to life for all of us who are not willing to pace with tablet-style designed desktop environments on our Linux/Unix boxes!!!!! Let it soar again!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    Reply ↓

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  48. Hi.

    Here some thanks from a happy Linux user.

    I cannot comment in http://cinnamon.linuxmint.com/ , related to this project. So I put it here, if there’s no inconvenience:

    I think it would be important and helpful an About section in that website of Cinnamon, like this one in this one of MATE.

    Could someone pass this message to the site of Cinnamon, please?

    Thank you

    Reply ↓

  49. Hi:

    I’ve been able to write the comment in the site of Cinnamon. I think that probably NoScript was blocking the ability to do so.

    Thanks and my excuses

    Reply ↓

  50. Why Mate?
    Is it Argentine Mate or Uruguayan mate. Any of those between developers?
    Either way, great stuff, just got it working on fedora 18 with compiz, amazing, good work people.
    What i do miss is the ‘safely remove’ option to power off usb devices and maybe a variety of login screen to tune up the awesomeness .
    Cheers

    Reply ↓

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  52. I always used to use GNOME2. Now I’m using MATE, and I am glad that this environment is further developed. Thank you very much! :)

    Reply ↓

  54. I have always liked the gnome 2 interface better than gnome 3 which to me is very much still in development. Glad to see it updated, because the fedora 14 the last one to offer gnome 2 is getting outdated. Hope Mate become the official interface for Red Hat Enterprise and Centos OS. Great Job.

    Reply ↓

  55. Thank you for Mate. I am using it on Arch and will probably move to it on my Gentoo system too. Nice to be able to run my old favourite dark themes. I can’t work with Gnome shell, it’s terrible.

    Reply ↓

  57. Mageia is the 2nd most popular linux distribution (according to the website distrowatch), and unfortunatly there is no package available… It takes me a lot of time but I manage to install it from Fedora 17 package… and it yeear: I’m a fan ! Great job!
    Is there someone to build some Mageia packages, please ?! Thanks a lot… and, again… congratulation ! Gnome 3 sucks and it’s a very good initiative.
    Cheers

    Reply ↓

  58. Love it, stuck mate on top of ubuntu 12.10, got rid of the fubar rubbish that is unity and now I can get back to work. Cheers.

    Reply ↓

  60. Just trying mate for the first time as mate, but I did like Gnome 2. I havent even got Mate installed yet, its just doing it. Anyway I am absolutely ecstatic that the installation is whizzing along, not like when I tried to install cinnamon and that other Gnome 3 rubbish. At last I can go back to a Linux distro…. OK mates installed … bye for now and Thanks for being stars and keeping common sense going while the rest of the Linux desktop world indulges in cloud cuckoo land

    Reply ↓

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