Which one is better, and why?

GECKO plasma 5 is BETTER !

https://geckolinux.github.io/

Ford or Chevy?
HP or Dell?
Nike or Adidas?

Which one is better for YOU is your decision. Thankfully you can try both for free.

By the way, you can run MATE on many other distros as well.

Good luck!

1 members found this post helpful.

Clement Lefebvre, who is responsible for Mint, is also part of the Mate team. In fact, Ubuntu uses his deb package. If you get Mint, you're getting the authentic Mate, so to speak.

I always say that it's safest to use a disto with its default desktop, because the quality is guaranteed: that's what the developers are using and most of the end-users. Alternatives may be fine, and they may be a pain. My CentOS defaults to Gnome, it's fine with KDE, but it's a pain with Xfce. For years, SUSE versions other than KDE often came with various useful bits missing!

Is MATE the default? The Cinnamon desktop was originally authored and continues to be developed by the Linux Mint team. Yet it seems that users encounter more problems with Cinnamon than with MATE, but perhaps I am mistaken about that. MATE and Cinnamon editions are generally released first together, ahead of KDE and XFCE editions, but all four are listed as default from Mint 13 to the present. However, the Linux Mint Debian Edition (LMDE) uses only Cinnamon or MATE.

What I meant was it isn't the default for Ubuntu: as I said, they use Clem's packaging.

In Mint, Clem organised a poll on the forum as to whether Mate or Cinnamon should be the default. The result was close, so he declared them equal. That's a nice contrast to Mark Shuttleworth's famous remark that if he allowed users to reconfigure Unity they'd only spoil it, or the often-repeated "Debian's not a democracy."

2 members found this post helpful.

I didn't know that. Thanks for the info, David. If only I'd known about it I could have had all my friends vote for MATE.

1 members found this post helpful.

Sorry, David. Sometimes I read faster than my brain can keep up!