linuxmint.com web site should recommend MATE

[nomko]

currently mint 15 should only come with MATE and XFCE. Cinnamon is royally fudged, the coding is sloppy.
crashes left, right and center on multiple hardware types using oem driver or open source.

It could also be a hardware problem. Unstable hardware due to manufacturing errors not noticed by the quality check....

If 100 users are all using Mint 15 + Cinnamon and on the system of 1 person Cinnamon is crashing now and then and not on the system of the other 99 users. Is it by definition the fault of Cinnamon that it crashes on your system???

[InkKnife]

If anything Mint should put Cinnamon front and center. Look out at sites, blogs and podcasts that cover Linux. Cinnamon has all the buzz, I rarely see any mention of MATE. When n00bs come to the Mint site they are mostly coming because of the big mind share Cinnamon has gained.
MATE was concieved as a DE for those invested in the Gnome2 parigdmn, Cinnamon is the DE that has an open ended future.
Don't get me wrong, I think MATE is quite nice and if Cinnamon were not an option I would be running MATE now, or XFCE. But I just switched last year, I have no old Gnome2 habits I don't want to change and I like the plusher enviroment of Cinnamon.

[passerby]

It makes sense that Cinnamon is given more attention. It is the Mint team's baby, after all.
I think the real problem is that new users who want to give Mint a go aren't given enough info on the differences.
Looking at the [url=http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2366]Mint 15 release announcement[/url], or going to the [url=http://www.linuxmint.com/edition.php?id=132]Mint 15 Cinnamon download page[/url], it's never mentioned that Cinnamon isn't suitable for old PCs or that it's more resource-heavy than MATE, the prominent alternative offered. The same system requirements are listed for each.
It may not be a problem for users who already know what they're after and why, or for those with compatible hardware, but for anyone else, they may end up with a horrible first impression of Mint because they chose a desktop environment not suited to their setup.

Not to get off-topic, but I think the bigger issue is that there's too much emphasis on the "latest and greatest".
It's good for users who are used to or don't mind reinstalling every 6-9 months, but for users coming over from Windows or OSX, who presumably don't know what an LTS release is, being told they'd need to reinstall after 9 months in order to receive updates is a turn-off at best.