When comparing Deepin DE vs MATE, the Slant community recommends Deepin DE for most people. In the question“What are the best desktop environments for Arch Linux?” Deepin DE is ranked 6th while MATE is ranked 9th. The most important reason people chose Deepin DE is:
Deepin DE has some blur designs which make it very beautiful.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Very beautiful
Deepin DE has some blur designs which make it very beautiful.
Pro Easy to use
Deepin DE is very simple.
Pro Stable
Pro Includes quality programs
It has some of it's own programs which are quite beautiful.
Pro A modern de for Linux
Deepin is the first DE for Linux which looks and acts like a modern environment. Basically, Deepin succede where Gnome 3 failed
Pro Quite lightweight
Deepin 15.7 has been optimized and now uses less than half the system resources of prior editions.
Pro Has a Windows-like and Mac-like interface
Easily switchable between the two, as well!
Pro Available for a lot of distros
Deepin DE is currently supported on Deepin OS, Ubuntu, OpenSUSE, Arch Linux, Gentoo, Fedora, Sparky Linux, Puppy Linux, Pardus, Antergos and Manjaro.
Pro Touchscreen-friendly
Pro Option to turn off mouse acceleration in the settings
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.
Cons
Con Not very customizable
Con Bling Bling instead of features
Con Great DE, horrible distro
The Deepin linux distro offers its own empty package manager, and has lots of bugs. The DE and core apps are great though.
Con Buggy
Many features do not immediately work.
Con Not installable on Ubuntu/Debian
[UPDATE: Check out UbuntuDDE, a project trying to get DDE on Ubuntu and usable to normies like you]
At least, not easily, and not without potential problems. If you Want Deepin DE, use Deepin Linux, or grab Manjaro's DDE spin, or install manually on Arch Linux. Antergos, ArchLabs or similar.
Con Poor translations
Con Goes contrary to the concept of customizability
If you want non-configurability, go back to windows or mac. This is a step back for Linux.
Con Good but not available for many Linux distro
Con Terrible for desktop use
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.