MATE (desktop environment)
Desktop environment forked from GNOME 2
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
MATE (/ˈmɑːteɪ/ MAH-tay)[4] is a desktop environment composed of free and open-source software that runs on Linux, and other Unix-like operating systems such as BSD, and Illumos.[5][6]
| MATE | |
|---|---|
 | |
 Fedora Linux with MATE version 1.26 | |
| Developers | Clement Lefebvre, Perberos, Stefano Karapetsas, et al.[1] |
| Initial release | August 19, 2011 |
| Stable release | |
| Written in | C[3] |
| Operating system | Unix-like, Unix |
| Type | Desktop environment |
| License | GPLv2+, LGPLv2+ |
| Website | mate-desktop |
| Repository | |
Name
MATE is named after the South American plant yerba mate and tea made from the herb, mate.[4] 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!").[7] The use of a new name, instead of GNOME, avoids naming conflicts with GNOME components.[7]
History
Perberos, an Argentine user of Arch Linux, started the MATE project[8] 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.[9][10][11]
MATE was initially announced for Debian on November 8, 2013, at its official website.[12]
MATE became an official Arch Linux community package in January 2014.[13]
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.[14]
| Application name | Spanish translation | Forked from | Description | Features |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Atril | lectern | Evince | Document viewer | EPUB support
Caret navigation support[15] |
| Caja | box | GNOME Files (Nautilus) | File Manager | Extension support[16] |
| Engrampa | staple | Archive Manager (File Roller) | File archiver | |
| Eye of MATE | Eye of GNOME | Image viewer | ||
| MATE Calculator | GNOME Calculator | Calculator | ||
| MATE Control Center | GNOME Control Center | MATE desktop settings | ||
| MATE System Monitor | GNOME System Monitor | Graphical resource monitor | ||
| MATE Terminal | GNOME Terminal | Terminal emulator | ||
| marco | frame | Metacity | MATE window manager | |
| Mozo | waiter | Alacarte | Menu editor | |
| Pluma | pen | Gedit | Text editor |
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:
We consider MATE yet another desktop, just like KDE, Gnome 3, Xfce etc... and based on the popularity of Gnome 2 in previous releases of Linux Mint, we are dedicated to support it and to help it improve. The most popular Linux desktop was, and arguably is, Gnome 2.[17]
New features have been added to Caja such as undo/redo[18] and diff viewing for file replacements.[19] 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.[20] MATE 1.28.2 had greater support for Wayland, but did not provide a completely seamless fully native Wayland session yet.[21]
Release history
Note that between each release, development versions are tagged with odd-numbered version numbers. These are not announced as official releases.
| Date | Version |
|---|---|
| 2011-06-18 | Announced at Arch Linux forum[22] |
| 2011-08-19 | Initial release[citation needed] |
| 2012-04-16 | 1.2 |
| 2012-07-30 | 1.4 |
| 2013-04-02 | 1.6 |
| 2014-03-04 | 1.8 |
| 2015-06-11 | 1.10 |
| 2015-11-05 | 1.12 |
| 2016-04-08 | 1.14 |
| 2016-09-21 | 1.16 |
| 2017-03-13 | 1.18 |
| 2018-02-07 | 1.20 |
| 2019-03-18 | 1.22 |
| 2020-02-10 | 1.24 |
| 2021-08-03 | 1.26 |
| 2024-02-12 | 1.28[23] |
Adoption
The MATE website lists 27 Linux distributions and 5 Unix-like operating systems that support the MATE desktop environment.[24]
It is available on the official repositories of only 22 of those Linux distributions.[25]
Reception
MATE was praised for having a classic feel, with an "incredibly sharp" default theme and icon pack.[26] 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.[27]
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.[28]
The inclusion of GNOME Shell in GNOME 3 was a controversial decision.[29] The users that preferred GNOME 2 have found MATE to be much more reliable for old-school users.[30]
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.[30]
