MATE is described as 'Many users of GNOME 2 dislike GNOME 3. MATE is a fork of the good old GNOME 2. It provides an intuitive and attractive desktop environment using traditional metaphors for Linux and other Unix-like operating systems' and is a very popular desktop environment in the os & utilities category. There are more than 10 alternatives to MATE for a variety of platforms, including Linux, BSD, Windows, Mac and Linux Mobile apps. The best MATE alternative is KDE Plasma, which is both free and Open Source. Other great apps like MATE are GNOME, Xfce, Cinnamon and LXQt.
Plasma is a cross-device work environment by the KDE Community where trust is put on the user's capacity to best define their own workflow and preferences.
An easy and elegant way to use your computer, GNOME is designed to help you have the best possible computing experience.
Xfce (pronounced as four individual letters) is a free software desktop environment for Unix and other Unix-like platforms, such as Linux, Solaris and BSD. It aims to be fast and lightweight, while still being visually appealing and easy to use.
The "Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment" is an extremely fast-performing and energy-saving desktop environment.
The Budgie Desktop is a feature-rich, modern desktop designed to keep out the way of the user. It consists of a number of components to provide a more complete desktop experience.
Budgie is a newcomer to the desktop game. It lies on top of Gnome to give an updated and more intuitive look-and-feel. It's not a good replacement for MATE yet (might be in the future), mainly because it runs considerably slower and has quite a few unresolved bugs as of the time of writing. Promising, though.
Enlightenment is a Window Manager, Compositor and Minimal Desktop for Linux (the primary platform), BSD and any other compatible UNIX system.
Window Maker has a reputation for being fast, efficient and highly stable. Window Maker has been characterized as reproducing "the elegant look and feel of the NeXTstep GUI" and is noted as "easy to configure and easy to use.
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XFCE and MATE follow a very similar design philosophy and both are similar in the way they feel to customize. Both use the GTK+ toolkit and both are relatively light on resources, making both good choices for lower-spec/older computers.