KDE or Mate?

On 28/08, name at domain wrote:
> i am messing with the De and i cant decide. what are the advantge of mate? i
> love Kde but i wanted to see why my friends are using Mate? i probably
> install mate and use it for a week but i am very confuse why my friend like
> so much.
Hello! Before I begin with the difference between DEs could I
recommend the FLOSS program LanguageTool. It's a plugin for
Libreoffice, Firefox/forks, Emacs, and the rest which helps with
English grammar and spelling. I know how hard it's to get that down
since I'm a non-native speaker myself and they really helped!

Anyways let me get to the actual point of your email. Let me start
with the history of DEs in the GNU/Linux scene. From the beginning
there were two big projects for desktops for X.org. GNOME was (and
still is!) part of the GNU project and the third project of its kind
and you had KDE. KDE was a German project which was based on the, at
the time, non-free QT toolkit.

GNOME adopted GTK (originally from GIMP) and the GNU/Linux community
divided between the two and started a bloody war which still rages on
today. Nowadays GNOME is seen, at least by me, as extendable and
beautiful out of the box while KDE is seen as heavy, ugly out of the
box but highly configurable.

Anyways after GNOME released version 3 people got quite mad because
the entire look changed. So some people who really liked version two
decided to fork it and mantain it. This project got called MATE. In
comparison to KDE/GNOME it's lighter weight but also has less developers. So
if you want cutting edge stuff like Wayland support MATE is not the
desktop..

It is more traditional then GNOME 3 but looks a bit less pretty out of
the box. It's prettier out of the box but less configurable then KDE.

Also do note I was talking about KDE4 here and not Plasma which
actually quite pretty but not totally stable yet.

Here is a Linux Action Show episode about MATE:
http://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com/75242/meet-mates-mastermind-las-347/

I hope I was in anyway useful.
--
Once the toothpaste is out of the tube, it's hard to get it back in.
-- H.R. Haldeman

all my friends went to Plamsa last month and really hated it, mind you that their arch users- they love breaking their rigs and learn how to make it work,but now they switch to Mate and trying to make me too. i already=y told them to i like stable but more gadets like bumblegum and the widgets. im going to use it for month to make them happy.

i pretty much told them since im on stable machine and on my favorite desktop a lot latley, ill try it out. it really getting use to on the different layout. im just glad they havent ask me to try rolling on the rig.