MATE vs. Cinnamon, which is more likely to continue?

[Fraoch]

I've had enough of Ubuntu and have almost made the switch to Mint, doing a dry run in a VM first.

The MATE edition went very very well, no problems whatsoever. Looks great. I have had a fair amount of problems with Cinnamon though.

I'd like to go ahead with MATE at this point but it seems like development and interest is focused on Cinnamon. Is this an accurate assessment? I wouldn't want to go ahead with MATE only to see it dropped in version 15 or 16...

I'm just wondering what the feelings of the community are at large. Are the major UI improvements all destined for Cinnamon?

Thanks for any responses.

[raymerjacque]

the mint dev's are active part of the mate development project as i understand it, as they are with cinnamon, I think both mate and cinnamon will be around for a long time...

Cinnamon has its kinks and bugs, but really they are minimal and more a nuisance than a deal breaker, Cinnamon is nice for eye candy. Mate is surprising VERY stable and low on resources.

It really comes down to preference.

[passerby]

From what I've seen/experienced, Cinnamon's development is more active than MATE's.
MATE is faster, lighter, more stable, etc. for the time being, but appears to be a smaller project overall.
Cinnamon has problems in virtualbox that don't exist on a normal machine. You might want to try a live boot; it'll be slower than an actual install, but it'll give you a better feel for the environment.

[raymerjacque]

i think reason mate has less development is that it contains less bugs to fix ? it would make sense. To date the ONLY problem i have ever encountered with Mate was the "force user" issue when trying to share folders to a windows machine and the work around was pretty easy to do. Apart from that i used Mate for MANY months and had no troubles at all. Cinnamon on the other hand ive experienced a few crashes, the theme support is still under developed and it has its moments where it just wont play nice with wine, but on the up side it is a Very nice desktop and is getting better with each release.

[xenopeek]

Cinnamon does have more active developers than MATE, but there is still a lot to do in Cinnamon and each new release brings further completion and perfection of the vision the developers have for Cinnamon. For example 1.6 saw Nemo introduced as the new file manager, and 1.8 will introduce Cinnamon control center, for all your settings and preferences, and Cinnamon screensaver. (Some screenshots and info in the "Latest development" section here: http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2318.)

Cinnamon is an exiting project, attracting developers interested in working with modern technologies and helping to further shape Cinnamon.

MATE is based on GNOME 2, so it has a very large and stable base. The developers are very much active there also, and passionate about what they are doing. Remaining bugs from GNOME 2 are being fixed (though there are less and less) and the team is working on introducing new features and adapting MATE also to modern technologies.

(You can explore the MATE project's GitHub page to see what is happening, for example here are the recent commits to Caja showing fixes and work being done: https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-fi ... its/master. Likewise you can explore the Linux Mint project's GitHub page, for example here are the recent commits to Cinnamon where you see a lot of "pull request" with changes from contributing developers being included: https://github.com/linuxmint/Cinnamon/commits/master.)

The Linux Mint developers also play a role in the MATE project, and the MATE developers also help out on the Linux Mint project. With Cinnamon being the most popular desktop environment amongst Linux Mint users and MATE the second most popular, and with both desktops being adopted by more and more Linux distros, I think you need not currently worry about "which is more likely to continue". Pick the one that works best for you

As to your first impression, it is known that VirtualBox's mouse can be glitchy on Linux Mint 14 Cinnamon (do make sure you have enabled 3D acceleration in your virtual machine's settings, and share as much video memory as possible). As passerby suggested, try it from a DVD or USB stick instead to get a good impression on your real hardware. The glitchiness of VirtualBox's mouse can be worked around a bit by disabling the hotspot in Cinnamon Settings (you can trigger the hotspot also with Ctrl+Alt+Up). Another user, but I can't find the post right now, had a script with a few settings that you could run to fix VirtualBox's mouse. Though experiences may differ, on my hardware I found MATE uses more resources and is slower than Cinnamon. So test them out also on real hardware, and pick the one you like best for the things that matter to you

[k357k9]

@xenopeek

Though experiences may differ, on my hardware I found MATE uses more resources and is slower than Cinnamon.

I just switched from Cinnamon to MATE and found the exact opposite to be true.

So test them out also on real hardware, and pick the one you like best for the things that matter to you

+1

[raymerjacque]

What i have done was to install Mate as my Base desktop environment since its the most stable of the lot. And then installed Cinnamon/Gnome 3/KDE Desktops on top of mate. They are all running pretty well. When i tried doing this with cinnamon as a base i had endless problems, but seems to work the other way around. So there is no reason you cant run both mate and cinnamon, but i would highly recommend you use Mate as the base desktop if you plan to do so.

[bimsebasse]

Mint development is focused on Cinnamon more than MATE because Cinnamon is a creation of the Mint devs (clem & glebihan, I think), and MATE is an independent project "championed" by Mint. You sometimes see MATE described as a Mint project or even a Mint fork, but that's a misunderstanding.

Personally I don't see the bright future of MATE, it will have to migrate to gtk3 at some point, or become slowly more irrelevant and niche. Cinnamon and Consort don't face that hurdle.

[raymerjacque]

As long as the demand is there i dont think they will simply discontinue Mate, its stable, perfect for low resource machines. Infact i listened to a podcast where clem said he runs mate on one of his machines and he also said that mate has a future.

[Fraoch]

Wow, thanks for the many replies.

I did resolve the mouse integration on VirtualBox with Cinnamon - it was accidentally switching workspaces. Since I don't use more than one workspace anyway I just disabled workspace switching altogether.

Cinnamon seems a bit more stable now but (virtual) resource usage remains quite high, enough to cause usability problems, while the MATE version cruises along with barely anything registering. I forget I'm in a VM after a while and can even run wine inside the VM!

Yes, real hardware is always better. Still, I'm devoting a fair amount of resources to the Cinnamon install: 2 of my AMD Phenom II cores at 2.8 GHz and 1.5 GB of RAM.

I will optimize Cinnamon some more to see if I can get better performance and I'll try it out on a Live CD before making my final decision.

[Fraoch]

As to your first impression, it is known that VirtualBox's mouse can be glitchy on Linux Mint 14 Cinnamon (do make sure you have enabled 3D acceleration in your virtual machine's settings, and share as much video memory as possible).:

Good tip - 3D acceleration was enabled but only 9 MB was allocated. I increased it to the 128 MB maximum. I'll see how it goes.

Thanks!

[Ponny]

I want Mate

[choupique]

I used MATE until the beginning of 2013. Received a present @ Christmas for my Ivy Bridge build, an Intel SSD. Went to install and decided to go with Cinnamon this time - and haven't looked back. Little nags that fixed themselves after installing Cinnamon like media keys not working on my Logitech keyboard with MATE are a big plus for me.
I do miss the little panel addon for weather with the temp, forecast, and radar from gnome2 though - I loved that old feature.

I do think MATE development will one day cease. I think the development of Cinnamon will be a focus as the gnome base keeps moving forward. I would think it will take over as the default desktop environment in Mint.

Cinnamon does use more resources and it took a little getting used to, but I now really like it.

[raymerjacque]

if you are going to game with wine then Mate is the way to go. If not then go with cinnamon.

[dee.]

Something to consider about the future:

Cinnamon is already based on GTK3, and if/when we all move to Wayland, GTK3 already has a (semi-)working Wayland backend built into it. MATE is based on GTK2, and while it's on the roadmap to migrate to GTK3, there's no guarantee of the speed or feasibility of the transition.

So from that perspective, Cinnamon would seem like the safer bet. Of course, in a practical sense, right now this doesn't matter as it will be some time still before Wayland will be production-ready, and who knows, the MATE team could manage to transition to GTK3 in the mean time.

Xfce is also in the same boat with GTK2 (as is LXDE). To me it would make sense for Xfce and MATE to join forces and try to merge their codebases, using the best of both projects. They seem like they're in similar positions and facing similar challenges, and have similar goals. But then I don't know how feasible this would be in practice.

Oh, and this is all pretty much conjecture on my part, so take it for what it's worth (probably not much).

[raymerjacque]

Sorry to be a party pooper. But i have used Gnome3, KDE, Cinnamon and Mate, and i can tell you without a doubt that running games via wine and ESPECIALY steam is 1000 times better in Mate than any of the others. And at the moment for me this makes Mate stand out since i have around 10 games installed via Wine, and a whole bunch others in steam. I had endless problems with steam in cinnamon ( annoying popups, steam crashing, games crashing etc etc ) and for a while i thought it was Wine causing it till i switched to Mate, suddenly steam and all my other games ran without problems, no more popups or any of that crap.

Cinnamon is nice for eye candy and it has some nice features, but almost EVERY user that is going to game and im guessing that is the majority of linux users these days will not enjoy the endless hassles of the instability between wine and cinnamon. So for time being i will stick to Mate until such a time that Cinnamon matures to the point where i can enjoy my gaming on the same level as i do in Mate, i dont care if Mate is GTK2 based, it is stable and it works without problems and that is what i want.

Secondly, As long as there is people that use older pc's there will be a demand for mate, i doubt it will die anytime soon.

Besides, with a little bit of effort mate can look quite cool if you know how to theme/conky/compiz etc etc ...

[passerby]

Interestingly enough, Cinnamon worked fine for me under LMDE, but not LM. Gaming included.

[raymerjacque]

Here is my Desktop and what i have installed :

The games all ran in Cinnamon, I just did not realize how smooth they could run until i moved to Mate. Some of the games that would randomly crash stopped crashing and Steam was the biggest headache for me, it would take ages to connect, it would pop up annoying windows if i left it open ( it pops up while watching movies and stuff forcing me to stand up and go to the pc and remove it ) crap like that was extremely annoying, in Mate it connects quickly and ive had no popups. Maybe its the newest version of wine that doesnt like Cinnamon, i dont know. All i know if i moved to Mate on someone else's suggestion and its been a PLEASURE ever since. Sure i have less eye candy now, but the smoothness ive experienced with gaming makes it worth it ten times over.

And to be clear it had nothing to do with installation or reinstallation, when i moved from Cinnamon to Mate i copied my existing .wine folder over ( with winetricks ), i also used the APT cache folder to reinstall wine so i wouldnt have to download anything, i remade all shortcuts to games manually. So its the same setup, i simply changed desktop enviroments.

[zerozero]

Maybe its the newest version of wine that doesnt like Cinnamon, i dont know

non-openGL DEs have better and faster results with intensive graphic demanding app (like games)
mate is a compromise between user-friendness and efficiency in this regard but if you want 100% efficiency you have to look at openbox or "similar" WM

[bimsebasse]

First a Gnome Shell crusade at the expense of Cinnamon, now a MATE crusade at the expense of Cinnamon - raymerjacque, I look forward to you KDE crusade at the expense of Cinnamon