This Blog post a (my) opinion on Cinnamon and the Mate desktop

This week I switched my Linux Desktop from Cinnamon back to the Mate Desktop, after being using Cinnamon for more than half a year. Cinnamon might appear to be a more modern environment, very similar to a Windows desktop system. Mate is in my opinion more mature, yet lighter. Both are just fine Desktop environments, however I wanted to switch to something lighter again.

So, during this week I decided to jump ship and move back to Mate. On Tuesday I switched my daily driver (openSUSE Tumbleweed) with no major hassle. And today I also made Mate the default desktop environment on my private laptop (also Tumbleweed) and my main workstation (openSUSE Leap). The transition was painless, and since I used Mate before already on all of my devices I could just return to an already configured Desktop system. I also took the opportunity to clean out some old packages and patterns, which I do not use anymore.

Why Mate?

I love the Mate desktop for its simplicity and its low footprint. On my rather old (but still rocking!) Lenovo x220t I felt an immediate difference - the system just behaves snappier. Opening a terminal happens in an instant, while on Cinnamon it always took those 1-2 seconds before it was there. And more importantly, the battery runtime almost doubled!

I think this will become again my new old home. The Mate desktop feels nice, cozy, maybe not so modern, but never old. For a retrospective future. Mate.