Rejected GNOME 3's radical UX changes. Preserved the GNOME 2 desktop for users who preferred it.
GNOME 2 was the dominant Linux desktop environment from 2002 to 2011, featuring a traditional panel-based desktop with taskbar, system tray, and application menu. MATE continues this paradigm while modernizing the underlying technology, including porting to GTK3 and supporting modern display technologies like HiDPI.
When GNOME 3.0 launched on April 6, 2011, it was one of the most radical redesigns in desktop Linux history. Gone was the familiar panel-based desktop with its taskbar, system tray, and application menu. In its place was GNOME Shell — a sleek, minimalist interface built around activities, workspaces, and full-screen application launchers. The GNOME team believed they were building the future of desktop computing. A very vocal portion of their user base believed they were committing UI suicide.
German Perugorria, an Argentine Arch Linux user known as 'Perberos,' decided to do something about it. On June 18, 2011, he posted on the Arch Linux forums announcing that he had forked GNOME 2 and was calling the project MATE (named after the yerba mate plant, a staple South American beverage). The initial work was unglamorous but essential: renaming every GNOME 2 component to avoid conflicts with GNOME 3 packages, so both could be installed on the same system.
Perberos was soon joined by Stefano Karapetsas, who helped with development, and critically by Clement Lefebvre of Linux Mint, who packaged MATE for Debian-based distributions. Linux Mint 12 (November 2011) shipped with MATE as an option alongside GNOME 3, giving the fledgling project instant exposure to one of the most popular Linux distributions.
The project steadily matured. MATE didn't just freeze GNOME 2 in amber — it continued active development, porting components to GTK3, adding new features, and improving hardware support. It became an official desktop environment in the Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, and Arch repositories, achieving a legitimacy that many early observers doubted it would reach.
MATE proved that there was a genuine, sustained demand for the traditional desktop metaphor that GNOME 3 had abandoned — not just nostalgia, but a preference for a workflow that many users found more productive.
GNOME 3.0 released, replacing the traditional desktop with GNOME Shell
First public MATE GitHub repositories created
Linux Mint 12 ships with MATE as a desktop option
MATE 1.4 released — first fully stable release
MATE accepted into Debian official repositories
Ubuntu MATE becomes an official Ubuntu flavor
MATE 1.20 completes GTK3 port
MATE validated the idea that users should have a choice in desktop paradigms rather than being forced into whatever vision the upstream project dictates. Together with Cinnamon, it demonstrated that the GNOME 3 transition — while technically sound — had left a significant portion of users behind, and that those users represented a market worth serving.
The project also showed that 'keeping the old version alive' can be a viable long-term strategy, not just a temporary stopgap. MATE is now a mature, actively developed desktop environment in its own right, not just a GNOME 2 museum piece.