MATE is just continued Gnome 2 with tweaks to match modern standards, but still have the classic feel. The looks is only dated when you use old and default MATE themes. Modern themes and icons can be applied as MATE supports GTK3. It's also super configurable. Panel can be completely remade into anything you want. You can use only top panel and add plank dock for MacOS like layout. Caja file manager is clean and configurable as well. If you want classic desktop without bullshit MATE is the most mature and pretty lightweight. Works like a charm on 15 years old hardware. Just use modern themes and see for yourself how good it can look.
@@r3lativ Iv always had a hard time using xfce and ldxe in a virtual machine, specifically installing virtual box additions seem to just not work for whatever reason. I am not the most capable computer guy but other Desktop environments in the same family have had little issues with it including mate
I see behind the scenes videos of Pixar and Disney and Dreamworks animating their films, and I see Gnome 2 and Mate as their desktop on their Linux machines. I tried it and it was very nice. I instead riced my gnome desktop to look as close to mate as possible, going as far as to make my own extension to add the system menu back lol
Mate is amazing as a DE, I mean, so light and fast besides of the level of personalization than you can easily achieve and yep Ubuntu Mate is easily the best Linux Distro out there.
I will spare you the whole long story. I first saw Linux (Slackware) in March '95. It was a TTY only ~ headless. I first saw Redhat (long LONG before it floated on the stock-market) in about October '95, and it had a gnome2 desktop, and so I have been using mate for over 25 years. I went from being a Windows user who played with Linux (Ubuntu ~ inside a VMware box on XP) and became a Linux user who had a XP in a box,(VirtualBox) and perhaps 3 months after I moved, Ubuntu went all Unity on me. At first, it was like 'Check out our new thing. Isn't this cool?' But over time it got harder and harder to not use it, and after another month or so, you used Unity or you went back to Windows. At that point, I went and prowled DistroWatch, and #1 top of the charts, was Mint, everyone spoke very highly of it, and Mint had just released a new version, which included (as one option) their new desktop - which was called Mate and it was a fork of gnome2. Hello ~ come to Poppa! That's precisely what I'm looking for! I have been using the Mate desktop since long before it became the Mate desktop. The first Linux I ever saw had no graphics at all, but the second had gnome2 and that's what I've been using ever since. These days I have Mint 21 Vanessa, featuring 5.15.0-46-generic #49-Ubuntu SMP Thu Aug 4 18:03:25 UTC 2022 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux.
Ubuntu Mate is my preferred OS. I have used it for work since 2018. The only thing I find as an issue is removing the Ambient Mate appearance in 22.04.
Linux has so many beautiful DE's! First I loved KDE, then 'new' GNOME for it's work flow, then XFCE which can be also very pretty, today I saw few MATE videos and all looked very pretty! How anybody expect me to not do distro-hopping?! lol
Some time ago I used Solus Mate and I really liked it. More like a blast from the past, but a very nice one. In general I prefer the Brisk menu (that's what its called) over Whisker. Guess I'll have to revisit.
When I open your videos I can't help it, have to watch the whole thing even if I am not new to the information presented. You seem like a cool nerd to hangout with man.
I'm running Fedora 38 with MATE desktop as well as KDE. I much prefer MATE and found it's even good for gaming. The only reason I have KDE installed is because of the Wayland support, which is complete in KDE. MATE has made a lot of progress regarding Wayland support but isn't there yet. As soon a MATE has complete Wayland support I'll probably be returning to it as my main desktop because it's much quicker and easier to work with than KDE.
GNOME 2 was pretty good, enjoyed using it on CentOS 6 when i was just getting starting with Linux. But its successors like MATE and Cinnamon lost that expirience since switching to GTK 3. Just look at the file manager (Caja) - toolbar icons are out of style, sidebar is very unresponsive and doesn't fit with the rest of the UI elements, and their placement is pretty chaotic - most likely it is stupidly set in the code, and has no markup. It would be OK if you stick with GTK 2 and its limitations - their look has obviously just transferred from the old Nautilus, but that's not the case. If you claim to be modern then you can't just leave things as they were 20 years ago. At the moment even CLI tools like nnn, ranger, lf have a better expirience than these "user friendly" DE apps.
You can change the theme to something that looks better. But yeah, GTK3 is definitely rougher around the edges than its predecessor and runs very badly on old, pre-2010 hardware. GTK4 upped the system requirements even more, and has abysmal performance with software rendering.
You should try lxqt with kwin, its like a simplified kde but with all the advantages of the kde window manager, its super responsive too, I've been using it for months and I haven't experienced any bugs, besides the brightness panel applet which I don't really need anyway.
Gnome 3 is already gone, Gnome 42 becomes awesome with only a couple extensions (blur my shell, appindicator, input device chooser, then slap the gtk3 adw theme on legacy apps to make them look consistent and you're set)
I installed Linux Mint MATE on my parents computer, and the Advanced MATE Menu is pretty much just a Diet Cinnamon Start Menu. Very good desktop for sure, has never given me issues on any laptop.
Mate is a cool DE. Especially for super small screens it seems to be a blessing. My little ASUS EeePC 1015PX Netbook shows the best results when using Mate. No matter the distro, btw.
I was a Gnome 2 user, when Gnome 3 came out, I was not a happy camper, so I switch to XFCE, which was okay I guess, but really lacked the polish i was use to at the time. When Mate came out, I immediately switched to it and never looked back. My desktop would be laughed off r/Unixporn, I have one panel at the bottom and no wallpaper, boring I know, but my desktop is clean, simple, functional and takes me two minutes to setup on a new install.
Be careful with generalizing "better". Is KIA Ceed better than Hyundai Tucson? Is Mercedes CLS better than Volkswagen Touareg? Better for whom, for which task, at which point in time, under which circumstances? 😉😉😉
Thanks to Mate we still have normal windows with toolbars and menubars! Otherwise we would need to do our work using toys like client side decorations (CSD) wondows, where you have to find the fu_ing button with trial and error.
@@vsevapopov2 You said MATE was great for blind users. And I was interested in how MATE helps blind users and whether you also have any eye sight disabilies or challenges.
Xfce is my favorite desktop environment, although MATE is a close second with me. But Ubuntu? Absolutely NO for me due to the Snap packages and all the bugs and security problems that come with Snaps. What Ubuntu did there is UNFORGIVABLE (Debian Stable user here).
I'm a very thankful user of Mate and have been for years. Unity and Gnome 3 really weren't anything I ever wanted to use. I have had 0 issues ever since.
I switched all my family's laptops to Linux when I was like 14 (23 now) and I pretty much started them all off with MATE and they kept themselves there, whether it was Linux Mint or Ubuntu MATE (when it came along). So really "Linux" for them is really only the MATE Desktop environment 😅 like I'm pretty sure if I show them a new DE (heck this already happens when they see my awesome-wm set-up) they would think it's a different OS 😂
That's hard. I love XFCE, but I think now I'd choose Mate. Mostly because I know Mate is well developed by a fairly large team. XFCE is just a few people had has always felt like it is on the verge of being abandoned.
The Real story behind Ubuntu Mate, is best told by Wimpy, when it started in 2014, when his wife needed a working O/S, and he has to DO something... They say Love do many things. Epic. For new users, coming from WinDoze world, MATE is a good start. Anyway, for Ubuntu, I would wait for at least 22.04.1 LTS (x64) first, which is coming soon. Peace :-)
I like Mate, but TBF I used to run XFCE set up like Gnome 2.x back looong before Mate existed so I'm used to going that route vs using it outright. However I did run it for a while as the Ubuntu Mate spin as it was very featured vs what comes on Mint Mate.
i cant stand linux people pronouncing words, i dont care if its MATE' its spelled MATE, dont care if its GAH NOME, its spelled Gnome like lawn gnome. let me guess you call a Gif a jif?
Honestly I dislike lightweight distros, they are good, but for daily driving, it's very impractical for me at least, so I found out Ubuntu Mate, I didnt like how the desktop environment looked but, it was super easy to use just like Ubuntu or Ubuntu Cinnamon. Best part about Ubuntu Mate is that it's very quick but still has all the features you need unlike other lightweight distros. I really want to use Ubuntu Cinnamon, but on my old laptop it can't run well, I found it to be buggy, im sure they will have some fixes.
I started my Linux journey on Ubuntu Mate but got quickly annoyed by the constant bugs (which I found on every 'buntu) and the inconsistency of applet sizes and spacing. All of which were an issue last time I tried Mate a few years back.
I like Mate. but I am missing an option to do fractional scaling with your own value. So I go with XFCE. I think developement for Mate is stopped. Twister UI seems interesting. I was imperessed when running TwisterOS on my RaspberryPI4.
You keep saying “look and feel,” but, try as I might, I don’t feel anything on my screen. It’s just flat and smooth. The look keeps changing, but the feel does not. Do you have some sort of screen I don’t know about that is other than flat and smooth? Where can I buy one? It sounds very interesting.
As someone who has used MATE on Arch for a year, I never knew about any MATE-Tweaks type tool, and the fact that it doesn't come by default on Arch angers me.
12:00 Mate's Gnome2 paradigm. The genesis of Mate?? Pretty esotheric 😂 Can't you narrow that down in GTK terms? You mean GNU/Linux arguing UTF-8 for backwards compatibility with Unix reasons? Luke Smith calls that boomers, zoomers and normies.😂 But yeah, the Dark mode and layout panels are great. What's wrong with a dev driving an ecosystem forward? Every vendor keeps features for themselves. Using Mate Tweak with all these Panel Layouts is a great foundation for all the theming details you reviewed so often. Lol. Ubuntu is also the foundation for many that went headless, around the introduction of MIR/Wayland. Also very lovely when people do some 🔮 about the lifecycles of Open Source Code. It's not battle tested in history yet....
I'm using MATE right now, and I have to say... it's awesome, expecially if you couple it with the never matched compiz window manager. I agree that Ubuntu MATE is still the flagship distro to go for if you want to test it, but if you like to give it a modern twist, I would go with another default theme (despite yaru being very consistent and complete). I'm using Vincelliucie Qogir theme and Tela-Dark icons, and it's just modern and amazing. Oh I had to mention this: I'm daily driving it on my 27" 2011 iMac and this thing flies. It only uses about 500 Mb of RAM, so it's really lightweight too.
The Fedora MATE Compiz spin is my daily driver and is installed on 3 desktops, 4 laptops, 1 netbook and a Raspberry Pi 4 - I don't notice anything missing.
Its been a while since I've looked at or installed MATE, I forgot about the stuff I liked about it! Decided to add it on to my Ubuntu session, great video, thanks for the reminder!
I have used MATE on Linux Mint at one point a couple of years back. After using KDE for the last two years, Budgie has now earned its place as my main desktop environment.
@@WildVoltorb Indeed. Too bad Budgie has not been given much publicity outside of Solus. Ubuntu Budgie is perhaps the best flavor of Ubuntu, but we need more Debian and Arch distros using Budgie as the flagship DE. Unfortunately, not even Fedora and Garuda Linux have Budgie editions. Looking into the future, we will want an Arch-based distro using the upcoming Budgie 11 with the switch from the GTK to EFL toolkit.
@@Octavus5 OBS .deb doesn't work after install but obs snap does.... Themes doing weird inside the panel like dark mode having white inside the file manager dialog box but the rest of the system is dark mode. Desktop icons not showing in primary monitor. launcher bar losing quick launchers I placed. I have more but things are stable so I don't press my luck.... oh.... Mate welcome has to be ran with ... "sudo env XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=MATE ubuntu-mate-welcome " otherwise I I cant us the boutique.
Ubuntu as a main company has a really big problem now. More and more people everyday are realizing that Ubuntu mate is running so much more faster and efficient than the regular Ubuntu version. I also suspect that over the last 11 years , the reason why so many people left Ubuntu was because their desktop environment was increasingly getting slower and less efficient. People notice these things and I'm curious what Ubuntu s take on the matter is.
The different Ubuntu flavors have their own development teams working on them. Ubuntu MATE looks very nice, but I prefer Ubuntu Budgie mainly because it has better support for 4K displays. Yet Ubuntu Budgie performs better and is more efficient than even Kubuntu.
With Ubuntu Mate I have all the different DE's that I enjoy using without distro hoping, been using Mate for a decade, only way to go, my opinion. Good video, thanks.
It baffles me that XFCE is as popular as it is and yet MATE is seemingly disliked. IMO, Mate does the traditional paradigm better than XFCE and better than Cinnamon too. I think stock Mate on Arch is also better than Ubuntu (for one, you can actually see the active window when window switching). It's also strange that the stock theme and colors are as hideous as they are on Mate. Are the developers doing that deliberately to dissuade potential users?
@@WildVoltorb Green is one of my favorite colors, but the stock Mate green is not attractive. The wallpaper is not attractive. If developers are confused as to what "reasonably attractive" is, they could ask for suggestions. Throw a contest.
Excellent video👍 I was confused about the diff betw gnome & mate. I'm running Garuda Gnome which is really easy to use. But am looking a project where using tiles running diff apps at & documents side by side would be great when I came across a I3wm & mate 💥 & that's my solution. So now I'm researching the diff OS, DM, or Wm I can put together for my IDE🙉
I've liked Mate DE too. However, it doesn't work for me, or dare I say anyone else who owns a ultra wide screen monitor. Forgetting the terminal use, moving the mouse cursor all the way to the top left is too much ground to cover - very inefficient. Some other DE's like Gnome, for example, also have a top left Activities but this is duplicated by the Super(meta) key. Some other DE's can be configured so that they are centered, like Plasma. I wish Mate would create a similar trigger for their menu system where one can begin typing the application wanted. AFAIK, it can't do that now.
Update: I installed Mate in the Ubuntu 22.10 version in a VM. Indeed there are more features that make it more worth while. The added features to Mate are a significant upgrade to the standard version. However, I am having many issues with this install. It frequently freezes and becomes unresponsive (buttons and icons not responding). I'd think this is due to Ubuntu. I'll keep it a while longer. I wish these DE would make up their mind with the upper window corners rounded and the bottom corners pointed. Let's have every corner rounded these days. Thanks for the review.
I am with you on that. XFCE is my choice for older machines as well. MATE has a slightly different aporoach to XFCE and you can feel the GNOME DNA in it. 💪
Mate and Cinnamon are basically the same. There is not much difference except that Cinnamon has the option to set a log out, shut down and other system sounds. Where as Mate only has the option to set up a start up sound but not s shutdown or log out sound. Although you can enable event sounds. The man in the video is using Ubuntu Mate which has more features than Linux Mate Mate. When I tried Mint Mate I though it looks very much like their old version of Linux Mint Gnome which I used to use before Mint discontinued it. Some of the themes on Ubuntu Mate also look like Mint Gnome which I think Mate is based on. That's the old version of Gnome they had before they changed it and remove the Windows style start menu. Cinnamon is also based on the old version of Gnome but has a more modern look. The Mate Panel with the Mate Menu is included in the Cinnamon desktop. It is part of the fallback mode in case the system crashes but you can launch Mate Panel in Cinnamon. So those of you who are running Cinnamon but what the old look of Mate don't need to install Mate if all you want is the panel and menu. Both Mate and Cinnamon are good if you are an ex-Windows user like myself and want something with the Windows style start menu. The only thing I don't like about Mate is that you cannot enable shutdown or log out sound. where as on Cinnamon you can. I don't know why that is. That option was in Linux Mint Gnome but they took it out of Mate but kept it in Cinnamon.
They are currently based on ubuntu, so obviously they'll have similar feature set except for the things that they don't like(snap packages for example)
Yep, Mint has a wonderful and beautiful configuration of MATE. Definitely worth a try. And whatever they did to MATE has nothing to do with Ubuntu. Mint's MATE could easily be implemented into LMDE as well. 💪
It is beautiful only in Ubuntu/Mint. Vanilla default Mate on other distributions like Arch, Fedora, Debian - looks terrible. There are only a few ugly themes like Menta and slow black theme and ugly gray theme. There are not enough normal themes like in Gnome 2 on GTK2. I used Gnome in 2005 and it was beautiful. But now it's too sad. Also, the image view "Eye of Mate" does not open in full screen. EOM does not remember the window setting and file sorting order. I use Gthumb - but it looks a bit alien due to gtk4.
Any reasonable desktop, like Mate, KDE, XFCE, etc. would be preferable to Gnome as a default Linux desktop. If you like gnome, that should be your own niche thing, and not something that should be fed to everyone else. Just give me basic desktop functionality, like minimize, maximize and close buttons, list of windows on a task bar, systray, etc.
I think xfce is the better option, xfce has better window placement than mate, gnome, cinnamon, and mate all lack smart window placement, which makes them unusable for me, but mate and xfce have weird rendering where they will render the window decoration first and then fill in the contents after, its more noticeable on slower machines but if you slow the video down you can see it when he opens the file manager, lxqt with kwin is my favorite desktop, its simple, lightweight, super fast and responsive, but still has all the advanced features of kwin.
I tried it for a few days, but it was so... terrible. I feel sorry for people who used to use computers a long time ago and have to put up with interfaces like this... terrible looks and terrible usability. I can see a lot of old people who are used to it and don't like change sticking to it, or people who like feeling retro.
You should try Budgie. Nice alternative to Cinnamon and is the perfect middle ground between GNOME and MATE as far as resource usage is concerned. Ubuntu Budgie has a very sleek desktop and any distro can be tailored to look like it.
Mate is more popular than you think.
Is it, though? I'm not so sure
"Slower than sin"
You would be surprised how fast sin can happen :D
MATE is just continued Gnome 2 with tweaks to match modern standards, but still have the classic feel. The looks is only dated when you use old and default MATE themes. Modern themes and icons can be applied as MATE supports GTK3. It's also super configurable. Panel can be completely remade into anything you want. You can use only top panel and add plank dock for MacOS like layout. Caja file manager is clean and configurable as well. If you want classic desktop without bullshit MATE is the most mature and pretty lightweight. Works like a charm on 15 years old hardware. Just use modern themes and see for yourself how good it can look.
Mate to me is just xfce but fully featured and not missing shit
@@blueshells50 What is xfce missing?
@@r3lativ Iv always had a hard time using xfce and ldxe in a virtual machine, specifically installing virtual box additions seem to just not work for whatever reason. I am not the most capable computer guy but other Desktop environments in the same family have had little issues with it including mate
I see behind the scenes videos of Pixar and Disney and Dreamworks animating their films, and I see Gnome 2 and Mate as their desktop on their Linux machines. I tried it and it was very nice. I instead riced my gnome desktop to look as close to mate as possible, going as far as to make my own extension to add the system menu back lol
Mate is amazing as a DE, I mean, so light and fast besides of the level of personalization than you can easily achieve and yep Ubuntu Mate is easily the best Linux Distro out there.
I use Fedora Mate on both my desktop and laptop. It's perfect for me.
I will spare you the whole long story. I first saw Linux (Slackware) in March '95. It was a TTY only ~ headless. I first saw Redhat (long LONG before it floated on the stock-market) in about October '95, and it had a gnome2 desktop, and so I have been using mate for over 25 years.
I went from being a Windows user who played with Linux (Ubuntu ~ inside a VMware box on XP) and became a Linux user who had a XP in a box,(VirtualBox) and perhaps 3 months after I moved, Ubuntu went all Unity on me.
At first, it was like 'Check out our new thing. Isn't this cool?' But over time it got harder and harder to not use it, and after another month or so, you used Unity or you went back to Windows.
At that point, I went and prowled DistroWatch, and #1 top of the charts, was Mint, everyone spoke very highly of it, and Mint had just released a new version, which included (as one option) their new desktop - which was called Mate and it was a fork of gnome2. Hello ~ come to Poppa! That's precisely what I'm looking for!
I have been using the Mate desktop since long before it became the Mate desktop. The first Linux I ever saw had no graphics at all, but the second had gnome2 and that's what I've been using ever since. These days I have Mint 21 Vanessa, featuring 5.15.0-46-generic #49-Ubuntu SMP Thu Aug 4 18:03:25 UTC 2022 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux.
Ubuntu Mate is my preferred OS. I have used it for work since 2018. The only thing I find as an issue is removing the Ambient Mate appearance in 22.04.
Linux has so many beautiful DE's! First I loved KDE, then 'new' GNOME for it's work flow, then XFCE which can be also very pretty, today I saw few MATE videos and all looked very pretty! How anybody expect me to not do distro-hopping?! lol
Oh, don't forget to my beloved Mint with green&black Cinnamon !!!
The Raspberry Pi 4 spin of Ubuntu Mate is also very good.
Some time ago I used Solus Mate and I really liked it. More like a blast from the past, but a very nice one. In general I prefer the Brisk menu (that's what its called) over Whisker. Guess I'll have to revisit.
You are talking about XFCE, Whisker and Brisk are part of that DE, not MATE. ;)
@@desktopmonologues there you have it, it is really necessary for me to give it a refresher :-) Good point.
@@desktopmonologues Whisker is for XFCE, Brisk is similar to Whisker but for MATE.
When I open your videos I can't help it, have to watch the whole thing even if I am not new to the information presented. You seem like a cool nerd to hangout with man.
Excellent desktop environment!!! Thanks for the video!!!
I'm running Fedora 38 with MATE desktop as well as KDE. I much prefer MATE and found it's even good for gaming. The only reason I have KDE installed is because of the Wayland support, which is complete in KDE. MATE has made a lot of progress regarding Wayland support but isn't there yet. As soon a MATE has complete Wayland support I'll probably be returning to it as my main desktop because it's much quicker and easier to work with than KDE.
I love mate! I just moved back to it, from gnome 42.
It's the most functional.
GNOME 2 was pretty good, enjoyed using it on CentOS 6 when i was just getting starting with Linux. But its successors like MATE and Cinnamon lost that expirience since switching to GTK 3. Just look at the file manager (Caja) - toolbar icons are out of style, sidebar is very unresponsive and doesn't fit with the rest of the UI elements, and their placement is pretty chaotic - most likely it is stupidly set in the code, and has no markup. It would be OK if you stick with GTK 2 and its limitations - their look has obviously just transferred from the old Nautilus, but that's not the case. If you claim to be modern then you can't just leave things as they were 20 years ago. At the moment even CLI tools like nnn, ranger, lf have a better expirience than these "user friendly" DE apps.
You can change the theme to something that looks better. But yeah, GTK3 is definitely rougher around the edges than its predecessor and runs very badly on old, pre-2010 hardware. GTK4 upped the system requirements even more, and has abysmal performance with software rendering.
"Hit the like button , if you would please". I like that a lot more than smash it!
Thx for video! Can i use MATE Tweaker on another distro with Cupertino layout?
The drink is even better. Mate > Coca-Cola. Guaraná > Coca-Cola also. Greetings from Brazil 🇧🇷
I use mojave icons. They're amazing!
9:50 actually it is possible in mint.
This wasn't really a video about the MATE desktop, more just a video about the Ubuntu MATE distro and the separate MATE tweak tool.
Should you use MATE? YES! Why? Because it exists... 😈
I really like their default text editor call Pluma. Add all the plug-ins and it's a great GUI text editor.
Yepp, DEs are interesting for which packages they come pre installed with. And MATE is amazing at that. Love Pluma as well 💪😊
Pluma Caja and their terminal are all rock solid tbh
@@Perry.... Looks like all their default applications are rock solid.
@@Perry.... Yeah the suite of basic applications in the mate-extra package is one of the great things about MATE.
5:22 xfce..
I’d like to see you check out the Nobara Project
It's on my list. I've done a lot of Fedora lately so I need to put some space in between
Why should you give MATE a try? Because it exists.
...ubuntu MATE???...22.04 missing advanced mate menu......mint mate,mintmenu is GREAT...
great review ... I just can't get over how similar all these DEs are. Nothing can ever convince me to change from my WM to a DE. Ever, lol.
i use Mate. I can't stand Gnome 3 and KDE is pretty buggy. that leaves me with Mate that just works and has a great workflow.
Gnome 42 is out
You should try lxqt with kwin, its like a simplified kde but with all the advantages of the kde window manager, its super responsive too, I've been using it for months and I haven't experienced any bugs, besides the brightness panel applet which I don't really need anyway.
Gnome 3 is already gone, Gnome 42 becomes awesome with only a couple extensions (blur my shell, appindicator, input device chooser, then slap the gtk3 adw theme on legacy apps to make them look consistent and you're set)
What about xfce ? Why is the mate workflow great for you? Just curious mate.
@@DMSBrian24 yep. I love gnome because its consistent and simple. And its polished
Mate just needs a fresh wallpaper pack.
That is mostly a distro's job 🤗
@@ArniesTech It can't be asking for that much to just ask them to go to Unsplash and include some more... not 2003-ish wallpapers.
I installed Linux Mint MATE on my parents computer, and the Advanced MATE Menu is pretty much just a Diet Cinnamon Start Menu. Very good desktop for sure, has never given me issues on any laptop.
Great, thats what I read from many MATE users. It just works and doesnt do wonky stuff 💪😁
@@ArniesTech Really any desktop environment on Debian, Ubuntu, or Mint, should work just fine.
Mate is a cool DE. Especially for super small screens it seems to be a blessing.
My little ASUS EeePC 1015PX Netbook shows the best results when using Mate. No matter the distro, btw.
I was a Gnome 2 user, when Gnome 3 came out, I was not a happy camper, so I switch to XFCE, which was okay I guess, but really lacked the polish i was use to at the time. When Mate came out, I immediately switched to it and never looked back. My desktop would be laughed off r/Unixporn, I have one panel at the bottom and no wallpaper, boring I know, but my desktop is clean, simple, functional and takes me two minutes to setup on a new install.
Use what works for you, that's the beauty of Foss❤️
it seems better than modern gnome
Be careful with generalizing "better".
Is KIA Ceed better than Hyundai Tucson? Is Mercedes CLS better than Volkswagen Touareg? Better for whom, for which task, at which point in time, under which circumstances? 😉😉😉
@@commietube_censorship_sucks then i don't think you've used modern gnome for a long time xd
Thanks to Mate we still have normal windows with toolbars and menubars!
Otherwise we would need to do our work using toys like client side decorations (CSD) wondows, where you have to find the fu_ing button with trial and error.
i use mate because it is simple, and what's most important, it is the most accessible desktop environment for blind users.
Wow sounds great, never knew about this one. Do you have eyesight handicaps, Vsevolod?
@@ArniesTech I don't really get what you are refering to. What are eyesite handicaps?
@@vsevapopov2 You said MATE was great for blind users. And I was interested in how MATE helps blind users and whether you also have any eye sight disabilies or challenges.
Xfce is my favorite desktop environment, although MATE is a close second with me. But Ubuntu? Absolutely NO for me due to the Snap packages and all the bugs and security problems that come with Snaps. What Ubuntu did there is UNFORGIVABLE (Debian Stable user here).
I'm a very thankful user of Mate and have been for years. Unity and Gnome 3 really weren't anything I ever wanted to use. I have had 0 issues ever since.
I switched all my family's laptops to Linux when I was like 14 (23 now) and I pretty much started them all off with MATE and they kept themselves there, whether it was Linux Mint or Ubuntu MATE (when it came along). So really "Linux" for them is really only the MATE Desktop environment 😅 like I'm pretty sure if I show them a new DE (heck this already happens when they see my awesome-wm set-up) they would think it's a different OS 😂
Lol great 😂👍
Can't wait for System76 to drop their official DE build of Cosmic.
Very nice video! Matt, if you were to choose between Mate and XFCE, which would you select?
That's hard. I love XFCE, but I think now I'd choose Mate. Mostly because I know Mate is well developed by a fairly large team. XFCE is just a few people had has always felt like it is on the verge of being abandoned.
@@TheLinuxCast Interesting - thanks for the quick reply!
The Real story behind Ubuntu Mate, is best told by Wimpy, when it started in 2014, when his wife needed a working O/S, and he has to DO something... They say Love do many things. Epic. For new users, coming from WinDoze world, MATE is a good start. Anyway, for Ubuntu, I would wait for at least 22.04.1 LTS (x64) first, which is coming soon. Peace :-)
Nice background info, Nicholas 💪😌
I like Mate, but TBF I used to run XFCE set up like Gnome 2.x back looong before Mate existed so I'm used to going that route vs using it outright. However I did run it for a while as the Ubuntu Mate spin as it was very featured vs what comes on Mint Mate.
i cant stand linux people pronouncing words, i dont care if its MATE' its spelled MATE, dont care if its GAH NOME, its spelled Gnome like lawn gnome. let me guess you call a Gif a jif?
The Guh-nome thing bugs the crap out of me, but at least there's a reason for MATE being pronounced as mah-tay - it's named after the drink.
Eu estou usando o PopOS 22.04 LTS com o cinnamon. O que é chato no ubuntu padrão são os Snaps.
Honestly I dislike lightweight distros, they are good, but for daily driving, it's very impractical for me at least, so I found out Ubuntu Mate, I didnt like how the desktop environment looked but, it was super easy to use just like Ubuntu or Ubuntu Cinnamon.
Best part about Ubuntu Mate is that it's very quick but still has all the features you need unlike other lightweight distros. I really want to use Ubuntu Cinnamon, but on my old laptop it can't run well, I found it to be buggy, im sure they will have some fixes.
I started my Linux journey on Ubuntu Mate but got quickly annoyed by the constant bugs (which I found on every 'buntu) and the inconsistency of applet sizes and spacing. All of which were an issue last time I tried Mate a few years back.
I like Mate. but I am missing an option to do fractional scaling with your own value. So I go with XFCE.
I think developement for Mate is stopped.
Twister UI seems interesting. I was imperessed when running TwisterOS on my RaspberryPI4.
You keep saying “look and feel,” but, try as I might, I don’t feel anything on my screen. It’s just flat and smooth. The look keeps changing, but the feel does not. Do you have some sort of screen I don’t know about that is other than flat and smooth? Where can I buy one? It sounds very interesting.
As someone who has used MATE on Arch for a year, I never knew about any MATE-Tweaks type tool, and the fact that it doesn't come by default on Arch angers me.
Always learning 💪😎
It's an AUR package, it's mate-tweak
@@SkyyySi I took a look at it, at first glance it seems like the options present are far more lacking than what's on Ubuntu MATE.
@@Absolute_Zero7 also Mate in Arch/Fedora/Debian looks ugly with a theme like Menta and very old icon theme
12:00 Mate's Gnome2 paradigm. The genesis of Mate?? Pretty esotheric 😂 Can't you narrow that down in GTK terms?
You mean GNU/Linux arguing UTF-8 for backwards compatibility with Unix reasons? Luke Smith calls that boomers, zoomers and normies.😂
But yeah, the Dark mode and layout panels are great. What's wrong with a dev driving an ecosystem forward? Every vendor keeps features for themselves. Using Mate Tweak with all these Panel Layouts is a great foundation for all the theming details you reviewed so often. Lol. Ubuntu is also the foundation for many that went headless, around the introduction of MIR/Wayland.
Also very lovely when people do some 🔮 about the lifecycles of Open Source Code. It's not battle tested in history yet....
I'm using MATE right now, and I have to say... it's awesome, expecially if you couple it with the never matched compiz window manager. I agree that Ubuntu MATE is still the flagship distro to go for if you want to test it, but if you like to give it a modern twist, I would go with another default theme (despite yaru being very consistent and complete). I'm using Vincelliucie Qogir theme and Tela-Dark icons, and it's just modern and amazing. Oh I had to mention this: I'm daily driving it on my 27" 2011 iMac and this thing flies. It only uses about 500 Mb of RAM, so it's really lightweight too.
I just wish it was integrated more so that Compiz could use the MATE window themes.
ubuntu mate is the best mate environment, but i use linux mint mate as i like the mint as the OS behind with flatpack support
I use Mate in my Desktop. My Distro is Ubuntu 20.04 LTS.
Nice vídeo matt
nice
i installed it on an old HP notebook that had windows 8.1 . Now everything works again.looks not too bad either.
One thing mate and cinnamon does best is they're not overly complicated like most distro without being too simple
The Fedora MATE Compiz spin is my daily driver and is installed on 3 desktops, 4 laptops, 1 netbook and a Raspberry Pi 4 - I don't notice anything missing.
Fedora 36 MATE on my netbook as well. Great DE 💪😌
Its been a while since I've looked at or installed MATE, I forgot about the stuff I liked about it! Decided to add it on to my Ubuntu session, great video, thanks for the reminder!
I have used MATE on Linux Mint at one point a couple of years back. After using KDE for the last two years, Budgie has now earned its place as my main desktop environment.
Budgie is very solid
@@WildVoltorb Indeed. Too bad Budgie has not been given much publicity outside of Solus. Ubuntu Budgie is perhaps the best flavor of Ubuntu, but we need more Debian and Arch distros using Budgie as the flagship DE. Unfortunately, not even Fedora and Garuda Linux have Budgie editions. Looking into the future, we will want an Arch-based distro using the upcoming Budgie 11 with the switch from the GTK to EFL toolkit.
Budgie is very underrated.
II use ubuntu mate as my default and I like it but it has some quirks are irritating
Curious. What quirks?
I've heard good things about Ubuntu MATE. The Budgie flavor has a few minor quirks as well, but once I fixed them, I'm loving it so far.
@@Octavus5 OBS .deb doesn't work after install but obs snap does.... Themes doing weird inside the panel like dark mode having white inside the file manager dialog box but the rest of the system is dark mode. Desktop icons not showing in primary monitor. launcher bar losing quick launchers I placed. I have more but things are stable so I don't press my luck.... oh.... Mate welcome has to be ran with ... "sudo env XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=MATE ubuntu-mate-welcome
" otherwise I I cant us the boutique.
Ubuntu as a main company has a really big problem now.
More and more people everyday are realizing that Ubuntu mate is running so much more faster and efficient than the regular Ubuntu version.
I also suspect that over the last 11 years , the reason why so many people
left Ubuntu was because their desktop environment was increasingly getting
slower and less efficient.
People notice these things and I'm curious what Ubuntu s take on the matter is.
The different Ubuntu flavors have their own development teams working on them. Ubuntu MATE looks very nice, but I prefer Ubuntu Budgie mainly because it has better support for 4K displays. Yet Ubuntu Budgie performs better and is more efficient than even Kubuntu.
With Ubuntu Mate I have all the different DE's that I enjoy using without distro hoping, been using Mate for a decade, only way to go, my opinion. Good video, thanks.
It's a Good to have a dm that it will always work the same or better but look the same👍 But I'm looking at Garuda i3W Mate!
thelinuxcast do you have any favorite dark theme / Colour scheme for Ubuntu mate ? best regards alexander
It baffles me that XFCE is as popular as it is and yet MATE is seemingly disliked. IMO, Mate does the traditional paradigm better than XFCE and better than Cinnamon too.
I think stock Mate on Arch is also better than Ubuntu (for one, you can actually see the active window when window switching).
It's also strange that the stock theme and colors are as hideous as they are on Mate. Are the developers doing that deliberately to dissuade potential users?
It's because mate is a type of green herb that you grind and drink as a tea (with a metal straw). The desktop colors reflect that
@@WildVoltorb Green is one of my favorite colors, but the stock Mate green is not attractive. The wallpaper is not attractive. If developers are confused as to what "reasonably attractive" is, they could ask for suggestions. Throw a contest.
yeah, I've always found MATE way better than XFCE
Excellent video👍 I was confused about the diff betw gnome & mate. I'm running Garuda Gnome which is really easy to use. But am looking a project where using tiles running diff apps at & documents side by side would be great when I came across a I3wm & mate 💥 & that's my solution. So now I'm researching the diff OS, DM, or Wm I can put together for my IDE🙉
is mate still supported? I can't find it on redhat. I did a yum search mate and i cannot find it. Did the name change? please help me
also if i want 2 "docks" i'll use awesomewm copy cats "multicolor" theme. lol
Synaptic does allow bulk-selection of packages before installation, although it is a less pretty frontend to apt that GNOME Software or MATE Boutique.
I have that same HP display you got in the background, purchased in 2008, still going strong in 2023!
It's a great monitor. For sure. I have two.
No no no it's like the smash button😉
It reminds me of a very early desktop experience I had mid 90s when I completely moved away from Windows. It’s nice to see it was maintained.
That wallpaper is horrible
I've liked Mate DE too. However, it doesn't work for me, or dare I say anyone else who owns a ultra wide screen monitor. Forgetting the terminal use, moving the mouse cursor all the way to the top left is too much ground to cover - very inefficient. Some other DE's like Gnome, for example, also have a top left Activities but this is duplicated by the Super(meta) key. Some other DE's can be configured so that they are centered, like Plasma. I wish Mate would create a similar trigger for their menu system where one can begin typing the application wanted. AFAIK, it can't do that now.
Update: I installed Mate in the Ubuntu 22.10 version in a VM. Indeed there are more features that make it more worth while. The added features to Mate are a significant upgrade to the standard version. However, I am having many issues with this install. It frequently freezes and becomes unresponsive (buttons and icons not responding). I'd think this is due to Ubuntu. I'll keep it a while longer. I wish these DE would make up their mind with the upper window corners rounded and the bottom corners pointed. Let's have every corner rounded these days. Thanks for the review.
Is this theming available only in Ubuntu or if I add mate desktop to Fedora all of that panels and icons are included?
The premade ones won’t be there. But if you install mate and then you install mate tweaks, you would be able to re-create them.
im not really a fan of that DE, just looks to old. and if im gonna use one with a windows dock might as well be xfce "with the age" lmao
I am with you on that. XFCE is my choice for older machines as well. MATE has a slightly different aporoach to XFCE and you can feel the GNOME DNA in it. 💪
GVM.
Will they migrate to GTK4 do you think ?
Probably before xfce does. Lol
Mate and Cinnamon are basically the same. There is not much difference except that Cinnamon has the option to set a log out, shut down and other system sounds. Where as Mate only has the option to set up a start up sound but not s shutdown or log out sound. Although you can enable event sounds. The man in the video is using Ubuntu Mate which has more features than Linux Mate Mate. When I tried Mint Mate I though it looks very much like their old version of Linux Mint Gnome which I used to use before Mint discontinued it. Some of the themes on Ubuntu Mate also look like Mint Gnome which I think Mate is based on. That's the old version of Gnome they had before they changed it and remove the Windows style start menu. Cinnamon is also based on the old version of Gnome but has a more modern look. The Mate Panel with the Mate Menu is included in the Cinnamon desktop. It is part of the fallback mode in case the system crashes but you can launch Mate Panel in Cinnamon. So those of you who are running Cinnamon but what the old look of Mate don't need to install Mate if all you want is the panel and menu. Both Mate and Cinnamon are good if you are an ex-Windows user like myself and want something with the Windows style start menu. The only thing I don't like about Mate is that you cannot enable shutdown or log out sound. where as on Cinnamon you can. I don't know why that is. That option was in Linux Mint Gnome but they took it out of Mate but kept it in Cinnamon.
What about the Linux Mint? Don't they do a lot of development on Mate
They are currently based on ubuntu, so obviously they'll have similar feature set except for the things that they don't like(snap packages for example)
Yep, Mint has a wonderful and beautiful configuration of MATE. Definitely worth a try. And whatever they did to MATE has nothing to do with Ubuntu. Mint's MATE could easily be implemented into LMDE as well. 💪
It is beautiful only in Ubuntu/Mint. Vanilla default Mate on other distributions like Arch, Fedora, Debian - looks terrible. There are only a few ugly themes like Menta and slow black theme and ugly gray theme. There are not enough normal themes like in Gnome 2 on GTK2. I used Gnome in 2005 and it was beautiful. But now it's too sad. Also, the image view "Eye of Mate" does not open in full screen. EOM does not remember the window setting and file sorting order. I use Gthumb - but it looks a bit alien due to gtk4.
It's quick and easy to make it look better.
Used to love gnome, then, it happened, 3
Any reasonable desktop, like Mate, KDE, XFCE, etc. would be preferable to Gnome as a default Linux desktop. If you like gnome, that should be your own niche thing, and not something that should be fed to everyone else. Just give me basic desktop functionality, like minimize, maximize and close buttons, list of windows on a task bar, systray, etc.
I think xfce is the better option, xfce has better window placement than mate, gnome, cinnamon, and mate all lack smart window placement, which makes them unusable for me, but mate and xfce have weird rendering where they will render the window decoration first and then fill in the contents after, its more noticeable on slower machines but if you slow the video down you can see it when he opens the file manager, lxqt with kwin is my favorite desktop, its simple, lightweight, super fast and responsive, but still has all the advanced features of kwin.
Does it support Wayland ?
@@rishirajsaikia1323 Not officially, someone has managed to get it to run using mutter, but I don't know how he did it and how well it works.
It looks so dated.
I tried it for a few days, but it was so... terrible. I feel sorry for people who used to use computers a long time ago and have to put up with interfaces like this... terrible looks and terrible usability. I can see a lot of old people who are used to it and don't like change sticking to it, or people who like feeling retro.
You should try Budgie. Nice alternative to Cinnamon and is the perfect middle ground between GNOME and MATE as far as resource usage is concerned. Ubuntu Budgie has a very sleek desktop and any distro can be tailored to look like it.
It's almost like you can fucking theme it and change the settings.. crazy right?.. dipshit
Ubuntu 🧉