MATE () is a

desktop environment In computing, a desktop environment (DE) is an implementation of the desktop metaphor made of a bundle of programs running on top of a computer operating system that share a common graphical user interface (GUI), sometimes described as a grap ...

composed of

free and open-source software Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

that runs on

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, whi ...

, BSD, and illumos

operating system An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common daemon (computing), services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems scheduler (computing), schedule tasks for ef ...

Name

MATE is named after the South American plant

yerba mate Yerba mate or yerba-maté (''Ilex paraguariensis''; from Spanish ; pt, erva-mate, or ; gn, ka'a, ) is a plant species of the holly genus '' Ilex'' native to South America. It was named by the French botanist Augustin Saint-Hilaire. The lea ...

and tea made from the herb, mate. The name is stylized in all capital letters to follow the nomenclature of other Free Software desktop environments like KDE and

LXDE LXDE (abbreviation for Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment) is a free desktop environment with comparatively low resource requirements. This makes it especially suitable for use on older or resource-constrained personal computers such as netb ...

. The recursive

backronym A backronym is an acronym formed from an already existing word by expanding its letters into the words of a phrase. Backronyms may be invented with either serious or humorous intent, or they may be a type of false etymology or folk etymology. The ...

"MATE Advanced Traditional Environment" was subsequently adopted by most of the MATE community, again in the spirit of Free Software like

GNU GNU () is an extensive collection of free software (383 packages as of January 2022), which can be used as an operating system or can be used in parts with other operating systems. The use of the completed GNU tools led to the family of operat ...

("GNU's Not Unix!"). The use of a new name, instead of GNOME, avoids naming conflicts with GNOME 3 components.

History

An Argentine user of Arch Linux, named Perberos started the MATE project to

fork In cutlery or kitchenware, a fork (from la, furca 'pitchfork') is a utensil, now usually made of metal, whose long handle terminates in a head that branches into several narrow and often slightly curved tine (structural), tines with which one ...

and continue

GNOME 2 GNOME 2 is the second major release of the GNOME desktop environment. Building upon the release of GNOME 1, development of GNOME 2 focused on a greater design-oriented approach that simplified and standardized elements of the environment. It als ...

in response to the negative reception of GNOME 3, which had replaced its traditional

taskbar A taskbar is an element of a graphical user interface which has various purposes. It typically shows which programs are currently running. The specific design and layout of the taskbar varies between individual operating systems, but generally a ...

( GNOME Panel) with

GNOME Shell GNOME Shell is the graphical shell of the GNOME desktop environment starting with version 3, which was released on April 6, 2011. It provides basic functions like launching applications, switching between windows and is also a widget engine. ...

. MATE aims to maintain and continue the latest GNOME 2 code base, frameworks, and core applications. MATE was initially announced for Debian on November 8, 2013, at its official website. MATE became an official Arch Linux community package in January 2014.

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. Mate-caja-1

Development

MATE fully supports the GTK 3 application framework. The project is supported by

Ubuntu MATE Ubuntu MATE is a free and open-source Linux distribution and an official derivative of Ubuntu. Its main differentiation from Ubuntu is that it uses the MATE desktop environment as its default user interface (based on GNOME 2), instead of the G ...

lead developer Martin Wimpress and by the Linux Mint development team: New features have been added to Caja such as undo/redo and diff viewing for file replacements. 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 The bonobo (; ''Pan paniscus''), also historically called the pygmy chimpanzee and less often the dwarf chimpanzee or gracile chimpanzee, is an endangered great ape and one of the two species making up the genus '' Pan,'' the other being the comm ...

) to

D-Bus In computing, D-Bus (short for "Desktop Bus") is a message-oriented middleware mechanism that allows communication between multiple processes running concurrently on the same machine. D-Bus was developed as part of the freedesktop.org project ...

. 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 Pixels per inch (ppi) and pixels per centimetre (ppcm or pixels/cm) are measurements of the pixel density of an electronic image device, such as a computer monitor or television display, or image digitizing device such as a camera or image scanner ...

was added and the

GTK+ GTK (formerly GIMP ToolKit and GTK+) is a free and open-source cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces (GUIs). It is licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License, allowing both free and prop ...

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.

Release history

Note that there are an odd number of versions between each official release. They are treated as versions under development, and are not announced as official releases.

Adoption

The MATE website (as of 8 September 2022) lists 27

Linux distribution A Linux distribution (often abbreviated as distro) is an operating system made from a software collection that includes the Linux kernel and, often, a package management system. Linux users usually obtain their operating system by downloading one ...

s and 5

Unix-like A Unix-like (sometimes referred to as UN*X or *nix) operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, although not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. A Unix-li ...

s that support the MATE desktop environment, The website also provides a

Distrowatch DistroWatch is a website which provides news, distribution pages hit rankings, and other general information about various Linux distributions as well as other free software/ open source Unix-like operating systems. It now contains informati ...

hyperlink In computing, a hyperlink, or simply a link, is a digital reference to data that the user can follow or be guided by clicking or tapping. A hyperlink points to a whole document or to a specific element within a document. Hypertext is text w ...

to "''query DistroWatch.com for all the distributions that support MATE.''"

Reception

References

External links

*
Official wikiMATE Desktop in OpenSourceFeed GalleryOld Official wikiMATE Desktop forumsnow closed
{{GNOME Desktop environments based on GTK Free desktop environments GNOME Software forks