When comparing MATE vs Elementary OS, the Slant community recommends Elementary OS for most people. In the question“What is the best OS for an old Macbook?” Elementary OS is ranked 1st while MATE is ranked 15th. The most important reason people chose Elementary OS is:
Excellent uniformity between all the stock application and an overall extremely clean design with simple animations.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Full HiDPI support
All MATE 1.24 components are ported to GTK3 and fully support HiDPI.
Pro Has window borders
Other than GNOME or Xfce, MATE has not introduced OSX-alike Client Side decorations
Pro Many new features
The MATE team added plenty of power user features that were perviously rejected by the GNOME team.
Pro Extremely customizable
MATE is customizable from every aspect. And very much stable compared to another Desktop environment.
Pro Works great on old machines
It uses a traditional Interface and less eye-candy/bling bling than KDE for example which results in very low system requirements.
Pro Very stable
MATE is initally based on the very stable GNOME 2 codebase that was for years the defacto enterprise desktop for every Linux system.
Pro Traditional desktop experience
MATE use a traditional desktop layout with panels that can be extended through plugins. It also disables some GTK3/GNOME3 features like: client side decorations and overlay scrollbars. MATE applications have also not introduced touch based ui elements like: popover menus and switch buttons.
Pro Distraction-free environment
There is no bling bling on this desktop so you can fully concentrate on your work.
Pro Multiple panels work great across multiple displays
This is very simple, but it is something much appreciate: the panel's window list is per display. So if you move a window over your second display, it gets transferred to the window list on the second display's panel. Multiple display support works very intuitively, right out of the box, with minimal tweaking.
Pro Has menu icons
MATE has icons in every popupmenu which makes navigating through them very fast.
Pro Full and fast
Scales better, full compliment themed applets, easily customization. App/Place/Sys menu and other menus, Mint version set at bottom for new Linux users. OPTION for panel background or follows system(with "controls") for theme matching.
Pro Pays its developpers
Thanks to the Patreon page, money is collected to pay for the developers maintaining and adding new features to MATE.
Pro Follows the GNOME2 HIG
Pro MATE is a serviceable choice
MATE is a solid serviceable choice for a DE. It is reliable and easy to customize. However, it lacks the icon placement in multiple monitors found in Cinnamon, KDE, or Windows.
Pro Does not need a composite manager
You can use it without GPU hardware acceleration.
Pro UI design consistency
Excellent uniformity between all the stock application and an overall extremely clean design with simple animations.
Pro Lightweight & fast
Runs well on limited-resources hardware, including netbooks or chromebooks.
Pro Built on Ubuntu
Built on Ubuntu LTS with all its qualities and support.
Pro If you like MacOSX the UI/UX is similar
Pro Extremely user-friendly
This distribution promises you a very tailored user experience and it does deliver on that promise. The developers provide you with a custom desktop environment and a set of neat programs. And the whole desktop looks simply gorgeous.
Pro Active Google+ community
There is a place where Elementary users can ask their questions and usually get answers pretty quickly. Not only by the other users, but the devs are pretty active themselves, often engaging in the discussions on the hows, whys, and plans of the OS.
Pro Simplicity, limited configurability
Sane defaults with less confusion for new users.
Pro Consistent development practices
All Elementary apps are written in Vala and hosted on Launchpad, and there are standard APIs such as contractor for applications to interact with one another. This is different from most distros, in which apps are written in a variety of languages. This design decision makes it easy to get started developing for Elementary and to understand how the various pieces fit together.
Pro A dedicated StackExchange site
Elementary OS has a dedicated StackExchange site where users can easily find answers to common questions.
Pro With new tweak tools customisation is not a problem
Now the OS is amazingly customisable
Cons
Con Some rough edges
Some apps have really rough edges, for example:
- Caja: by open an SVG-file and get a Dialog with 4 Buttons (Run in Terminal, Display, Cancel & Run) at least two of them make no sense. You can also right click on them to choose the application, however your default application for that filetype is not on this list.
- Panel: Empty panel applets are about 1px wide so you really can't resize or move them to organize your panel.
Con Not for touchscreens
Follows the classic desktop formula. It is also not designed for the use with a touchscreen.
Con Requires XML for wallpapers
MATE requires an additional XML file for wallpapes to store metadata like effects (for slideshows), its author, license and translations.
Con Thick window
Con No official forum
Instead of having an official forum, users are redirected to their distributions support forums.
You might get help at distribution specific forums but there is no proper way to communicate with the whole MATE community or its developers.
Con MATE can not save icon positions on desktop
Con It's Gnome 2, which is just a more difficult to use XFCE
Gnome 2 was a more bloated and less useful version of Xfce, and it still is now that it's called MATE. UI feels outdated compared to modern versions of Plasma, Gnome, and even Xfce.
Con Issues with changing users permissions and access
Con Unfriendly and hostile developers
Con UI doesn't let you change anything
Every installation of elementaryOS looks exactly like the same.
Con Old base and applications
The slow release schedule makes the applications outdated. It drags behind Ubuntu LTS (on which it's based) which itself drags behind Ubuntu which is often still quite far behind Arch for example.
Con Outdated or bad default applications
Con Poor Linux community reputation
The devs of elementary OS feel anyone not paying for their Ubuntu respin are not worthy of using it. Which upset a good bit of people. Obviously the core dev team have issues with their community outreach and PR.
Con Quite buggy
Con Very slow development cycle
Elementary does not offer any release date for their stable releases going more with an "it's done when it's done" attitude. Making depending on newer apps a difficulty as well as a poor choice for those that need consistent release schedules for their OS.
Con Not very configurable
Con The desktop doesn't let you to put icons by default
Con Limited and outdated packages
Packages can be very outdated, and many can't be installed from official repos.
Con Doesn't support 32-bit hardwares anymore
One can install pantheon DE from new ubuntu's repo but Elementry OS is not making new ISO's nor is it supporting them. It makes confuzzled to new users.
Con Upper panel requires extra spaces
The upper panel in Elementary OS requires more space. This can be a problem for computers with small monitors.
Con Emacs doesn't work
Emacs crashes due to a partial gnome library update.
Con Heavy animations
It has some animations that don‘t run well on older hardware.
Con Window control button placement may be unintuitive to some
elementary OS has window controls on the left side of the window. It may be less intuitive to users coming from other operating systems that put window controls on the right.
Con No proprietary driver installer
Elementary OS removed the driver installer of Ubuntu.
Con Problems with basic functions
Problems often arise with functions like keyboard layout and touchpad.
Con Boring UI
It can be very boring.