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Cinnamon vs Mate

Posted: Thu Feb 15, 2018 7:22 pm
by amagugaaq
Please tell me the significant details about cinnamon and mate, and why someone should choose one or the other. Unfortunately, the Linux Mint website offers no descriptive information to guide someone to choose one or the other, which is strange. I am considering installing one of them on a Dell i7 small form factor computer, 500 GB SDD, 16GB RAM. Thank-you very much.

Re: Cinnamon vs Mate

Posted: Thu Feb 15, 2018 8:21 pm
by Mattyboy
No one can advise you on this as it mostly comes down to taste.... that being said you would pick Mate over Cinnamon if you had an older machine as it takes less resources to run. ( your machine will run Cinnamon just fine )

You can test each desktop environment from a live boot before installing to get a good idea.... and before that, maybe, watch a few videos of each one on youtube. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_ ... namon+2017

Re: Cinnamon vs Mate

Posted: Fri Feb 16, 2018 1:21 am
by austin.texas
I consider the Cinnamon file manager (Nemo) to be much better than the Mate file manager (Caja). That is one of the deciding factors for me.

Re: Cinnamon vs Mate

Posted: Fri Feb 16, 2018 7:42 am
by Hoser Rob
You have plenty of RAM but with Cinnamon it's the graphics card I'd be looking at. I don't use Cinnamon anymore but if I were to install it again I'd make sure it was on a machine with a properly supported gpu in Linux and had good power. What's the graphics card in your machine?

It's also a matter of taste. The best thing would be to dl both the Cinnamon and Xfce versions and make bootable USB sticks from them. Then boot and test. Optical drives aren't fast enough to get a feel for things. The install the one you prefer, and don't install more than one desktop.

Re: Cinnamon vs Mate

Posted: Fri Feb 16, 2018 5:10 pm
by bob466
I use Cinnamon because it looks good...no other reason. :D

Re: Cinnamon vs Mate

Posted: Fri Feb 16, 2018 6:02 pm
by jglen490
I started with 18.2 Cinnamon on my laptop. A few udates later and Cinnamon would drop back to something that was not Cinnamon. I now have 18.2 Mate. Appearance wise, not much difference, but my old laptop is much happier with Mate.

Re: Cinnamon vs Mate

Posted: Sat Feb 17, 2018 2:30 pm
by trytip
your i7 cpu can handle any desktop

Re: Cinnamon vs Mate

Posted: Sun Feb 18, 2018 6:00 pm
by borg101
amagugaaq wrote: Thu Feb 15, 2018 7:22 pm Please tell me the significant details about cinnamon and mate, and why someone should choose one or the other. Unfortunately, the Linux Mint website offers no descriptive information to guide someone to choose one or the other, which is strange. I am considering installing one of them on a Dell i7 small form factor computer, 500 GB SDD, 16GB RAM. Thank-you very much.
Use GNOME *drops mic, walks out*'




*comes back*.....ok, use whatever you want, but GNOME rocks!

Re: Cinnamon vs Mate

Posted: Mon Feb 19, 2018 4:21 pm
by tenfoot
Mate all the way :D Adopt Mate and he will become your best MATE :lol:

<... runs away before the flames engulf me....>

Re: Cinnamon vs Mate

Posted: Tue Feb 20, 2018 9:26 pm
by borg101
tenfoot wrote: Mon Feb 19, 2018 4:21 pm Mate all the way :D Adopt Mate and he will become your best MATE :lol:

<... runs away before the flames engulf me....>
Mate, while good and fairly easy to use, is too simplistic looking. Say what you will about Windows 10....it feels "modern". That's kind of how I feel about Gnome and Pantheon.

Re: Cinnamon vs Mate

Posted: Wed Feb 21, 2018 2:19 am
by tenfoot
borg101 wrote: Tue Feb 20, 2018 9:26 pm
tenfoot wrote: Mon Feb 19, 2018 4:21 pm Mate all the way :D Adopt Mate and he will become your best MATE :lol:

<... runs away before the flames engulf me....>
Mate, while good and fairly easy to use, is too simplistic looking. Say what you will about Windows 10....it feels "modern". That's kind of how I feel about Gnome and Pantheon.

I agree, Mate is simplistic and that's why I like it.

<mumbles to himself> That's the trouble with these youngsters, they want everything glitzy a lot of 'bells and whistles. Its "bling" I say. It's just "bling" and lots of bling :lol:

Re: Cinnamon vs Mate

Posted: Wed Feb 21, 2018 4:13 am
by AZgl1800
borg101 wrote: Tue Feb 20, 2018 9:26 pm
tenfoot wrote: Mon Feb 19, 2018 4:21 pm Mate all the way :D Adopt Mate and he will become your best MATE :lol:

<... runs away before the flames engulf me....>
Mate, while good and fairly easy to use, is too simplistic looking. Say what you will about Windows 10....it feels "modern". That's kind of how I feel about Gnome and Pantheon.
it is that Windows 10 look and feel that drove me so far away from it, that I will never go back.
I hate that stupid blocky looking menu screen...

I ran Classic Menu on Vs 8.1 to get rid of that crap.
my desktop is staying on Win7 forever, and ever... it will never change.....
my buddy down the street, he refuses to upgrade from WinXP... he has 3 of them on his home network, and he has never been blown out of the water by the gremlins....

He turns them off when he is not using them, but that is about all.
I installed AVAST on the 3 of them, and they just keep ticking.
We also use MalwareBytes to occasionally check things out.

For me, on this Mint 18.3 Cinnamon, I have VM and it runs WinXP, Win7, and Mate 18.3

I just had to see what you guys were blabbering about with Mint Mate.... :mrgreen:

Re: Cinnamon vs Mate

Posted: Wed Feb 21, 2018 4:54 am
by iIMMIi
Any fairly recent high end Laptop (16gb RAM is probably very recent and high end) should have a GPU good enough to support Cinnamon. Even newer Intel GPUs are sufficient in my opinion (Cinnamon works fine on my 8-years-old Laptop's integrated GPU). So you should be good to use Cinnamon.

As for the looks, just search for mate DE and cinnamon DE on google and you'll get an idea of which you prefer. You can also watch a video.

Re: Cinnamon vs Mate

Posted: Wed Feb 21, 2018 9:52 pm
by MartyMint
tenfoot wrote: Wed Feb 21, 2018 2:19 am
I agree, Mate is simplistic and that's why I like it.

Same here. I just want to get my work done.
Now, if I wanted an epilepsy inducing kaleidoscope, I'd just install Plasma 5...Image

Re: Cinnamon vs Mate

Posted: Wed Feb 21, 2018 10:46 pm
by AZgl1800
MartyMint wrote: Wed Feb 21, 2018 9:52 pm
tenfoot wrote: Wed Feb 21, 2018 2:19 am
I agree, Mate is simplistic and that's why I like it.

Same here. I just want to get my work done.
Now, if I wanted an epilepsy inducing kaleidoscope, I'd just install Plasma 5...Image
No kaleidoscopes for me, I instantly went to my stock pure black background the first time the desktop appeared. I just enjoy the fact that it emulates the standard Windows keyboard shortcut command set.

I turned off everything that had to do with fancy crap, just like I have done in every Windows install from day 1 in DOS 3.0, oh, uh, that was a blank green screen in those days :mrgreen:

I was just curious if the OS in Mate is trimmer than Cinnamon is.
When I loaded it into VM and saw that it totally lacked any of the features from Cinnamon, ie, a stock set of Office like stuff, helpful apps for images, etc.... I had to assume that it was just the very basics required to make Mint run.

Re: Cinnamon vs Mate

Posted: Thu Feb 22, 2018 1:57 am
by tenfoot
AZgl1500 wrote: Wed Feb 21, 2018 10:46 pm I was just curious if the OS in Mate is trimmer than Cinnamon is.
When I loaded it into VM and saw that it totally lacked any of the features from Cinnamon, ie, a stock set of Office like stuff, helpful apps for images, etc.... I had to assume that it was just the very basics required to make Mint run.
Not strictly true. Unless my memory is going, LibreOffice, E-Bookviewer, Image Viewer. Pix, and Gimp are installed automatically. This more than covers the basics.

Re: Cinnamon vs Mate

Posted: Thu Feb 22, 2018 2:38 am
by Faust
There was something called Hybryde Linux a few years ago .

You could switch between all the major desktops "on-the-fly" ( no reboot needed ) to see which you preferred .
It was a bit of novelty , a fully working distro , but not much practical use for anything else except trying the different DEs

Re: Cinnamon vs Mate

Posted: Thu Feb 22, 2018 4:27 am
by Moem
AZgl1500 wrote: Wed Feb 21, 2018 10:46 pm I was just curious if the OS in Mate is trimmer than Cinnamon is.
When I loaded it into VM and saw that it totally lacked any of the features from Cinnamon, ie, a stock set of Office like stuff, helpful apps for images, etc.... I had to assume that it was just the very basics required to make Mint run.
I'm not sure what you did, but Mate comes with the same applications as any other version of Mint. It's just the ones that are directly tied to the desktop environment that can differ, such as the file manager. But it most certainly comes fully stocked with applications.

Re: Cinnamon vs Mate

Posted: Thu Feb 22, 2018 4:42 am
by AZgl1800
I think it was just the first appearance that I saw on Mate, have only used it twice so far.

Tonight, I installed MX-17 on Virtualbox and that is an interesting distro...
it also seems to have the necessary things to make life easy, but the install was a lot faster than what I am used to.

One thing common to all of the Virtualbox apps is that so far, none of them can see the USB ports on my laptop.

MX-17 can't seem to find my WiFi adapter.

Mate didn't seem to have that problem, it just fired up and went to the internet.

WinXP and Win7 both can see the WiFi adapter.

I am having fun with Virtualbox, it is allowing me to install a lot of stuff to take a glance at it, and then throw it away in a heap if I don't like it.

Re: Cinnamon vs Mate

Posted: Thu Feb 22, 2018 1:26 pm
by pbear
austin.texas wrote: Fri Feb 16, 2018 1:21 am I consider the Cinnamon file manager (Nemo) to be much better than the Mate file manager (Caja). That is one of the deciding factors for me.
Would appreciate if you could expound on this. The eye candy doesn't mean anything to me, but this would be a good reason to consider switching. I have a Cinnamon test box (full install). Only significant differences I've noticed are that (i) Nemo lets you control automount of external drives from preferences, where that only can be done in MATE with gsettings in Terminal, and (ii) Caja has a right-click option to open a file as administrator.