MATE desktop

The MATE desktop is a fork of the now-deprecated Gnome 2 desktop environment. MATE stands for MATE Advanced Traditional Environment. This is a similar structure to the GNU acronym, GNU is Not Unix. The renaming of the fork to MATE avoids naming convention issues with the still-current Gnome 3 environment.

MATE includes forks of many Gnome applications, and developers have written new applications. The names are in Spanish to reflect MATE's Argentinian origin.

MATE applications include the following:

• Caja: File manager (from Nautilus)
• Atril: Document viewer (from Evince)
• Engrampa: Archive manager (from Archive Manager)
• MATE terminal: Terminal emulator (from GNOME Terminal)
• Marco: Window manager (from Metacity)
• Mozo: Menu item editor (from Alacarte)
• Pluma: Text editor (from Gedit)

The first boot, and all subsequent boots, of MATE bring us into runlevel 3, as shown in the following screenshot:

The default GUI for MATE is familiar to most Linux users, as it is a near-mirror image of Gnome 2. The next screenshot shows that desktop with the default Kali logo. The Applications, Places, and System menu structure has been a long-standing mark of a Linux desktop, and many longtime Linux users welcomed the efforts of the MATE team to maintain the tradition:

The following screenshot shows all three system menus from the MATE desktop with representative submenus open. The Places menu opens Caja (file management) windows:

The look and feel menu offers you 12 preset appearance preferences, and those can then be customized further. The following screenshot shows a selection of those presets: