I have been inactive with Linux for a while.

What's Mandiva up to after the Mageia split? More of the same, A propriety like distro with chronic problems?

What about mate? I read that distros are putting it in their repos. Is it similar to Gnome 2? I have Gnome 2.4 ;I believe it is,on Mageia and it's okay but not the caliber that Gnome 2 was.

Thanks in advance!

They seem pretty moribund, but there still may be signs of life. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandriva

Moribund? That's a useful word I can use in any company. From that Wiki article , I would say that mandriva is pretty well "%?*!#-ed". I thought that Mandriva 2008 was close to perfect and 2010 was the most appealing but needed so many huge updates that it was stupid.

Any word on Mate?

Don't believe all you read on Wikipedia. Mandriva is now a commercial product, and seems to be for servers only. The forks are Mageia and ROSA, while (confusingly) OpenMandriva is a derivative of ROSA. I'm surpised that Mandriva s.a. don't object to the new OpenMandriva using that name. They've welcomed the new project, but if it's a turkey that may confuse people about the quality of their own product.

Mate is very like Gnome 2. One change (which I don't like) is that they've copied Gnome 3 in using a compiled configuration file: not the proper Unix way and very tricky if anything goes wrong. As a desktop, I've found it reliable and pleasant. Mint and Point are the Mate specialists, but PCLinuxOS, Salix, and Snow all do good ready-to-use versions. The Fedora version was a bit of a mess: see my review on this site.

The last version of Gnome 2 was 2.32, IIRC. Regarding MATE, I would be very surprised if it is not the caliber that Gnome 2 was, since MATE is just a fork of Gnome 2. Essentially, it is Gnome 2 renamed.

Thanks for the enlightenment. From My own experience , I would say that Gnome 2.32 was a down grade from 2 because Gnome 3 was not ready yet and according to Gnome , 2 was taking up too much of their resources. I would compare 2.32 to being in between Gnome 3 fallback mode and Gnome 2. 2.32 does not have hardly any bells and whistles.There is no Gui to shut the computer down after a certain amount of time ,there are only a few 'appearance' options and so on.

I heard on this week's SMLR that there's fork called Open Mandriva which has just given forth with a release.