Overview

MATE is a continuation of the GNOME 2 desktop environment, preserving the classic desktop metaphor that many users loved. It provides an intuitive and attractive desktop using traditional metaphors — a taskbar, application menu, and desktop icons — while adding support for modern technologies. MATE is actively maintained and available in most major Linux distributions.

Key Features

• Classic GNOME 2 Experience: Continuation of the traditional GNOME 2 interface with panel-based navigation, desktop icons, and a straightforward menu structure.
• Traditional Application Suite: Comes with Caja (file manager), Pluma (text editor), Eye of MATE (image viewer), Atril (document viewer), and Engrampa (archive manager).
• Lightweight Performance: Lower resource usage than modern GNOME or Plasma, making it suitable for older hardware while remaining fully featured.
• GTK3+ with GTK2 Compatibility: Modern toolkit foundation with ongoing development for Wayland support and compositing.

Platforms

Linux, BSD, Solaris, other Unix-like systems

Latest Stable Version

1.28.2 (March 11, 2024)

Licence

GPL-2.0+ (library components under LGPL-2.0+)

Website

mate-desktop.org

Parent Organisation

MATE Desktop team (community-driven, founded by Clement Lefebvre)