I've played a little bit with MATE on a friends old P4 PC and the performance was outstanding.

Is there any 'concern' that it's based off Gnome2 and it just won't stand the test of time? I hear that Gnome3 killed off a lot of users and they moved to KDE and XFCE depending on their system specs. Is MATE clawing back 'market share' or is it ultimately doomed despite it's (IMO) awesomeness on ~P4s?

Cheers.

Mint Mate doesn't have to "stand the test of time" but rather just the 9 months that each Mint release is supported.

As comparison, Red Hat (for example) plans to support RHEL6 with Gnome 2 through 2023.

MATE is a fork of gnome2.

It currently seems to have a bit of momentum, but as a "small" project (and based on "old tech") some may question it's long term viability.

At some point, this old hardware will be useless so that kind of limits the age of the distro to relict status anyway.

Distrowatch lists 21 Linuxes (and a BSD!) with Mate. The team's not so small, either
http://mate-desktop.org/team/

Listern to 'DavidMcCann',
some desktop istallations (nameless) move towards tablets, while large monitors exist the demand for appropriate displays will still exist.

Fred.

I run Debian MATE on various machines ranging from Pentium 4s through to initial i3. MATE has been accepted into Fedora (staging distro for RHEL so that's some heavy duty support), Linux Mint (probably one of the most well know distros around now), Mageia, PCLinuxOS, Point Linux (although they are using an unsupported version and I am not sure they have the man power to keep support themselves), Sabayon, and Salix. They are working to be included into Arch, Debian (various packages are already in Debian Testing and more are in New), Gentoo, OpenSUSE, Slackware, and Ubuntu (Ubuntu uses Debian's repositories as the base of its own). These are some pretty heavy duty and long term distros and I doubt they would consider a DE that has a short shelf life.

The idea that because MATE is a fork of Gnome 2 means it is ultimately doomed is getting old. MATE has incorporated new technologies, is evolving with each release and that is why the major distros have either accepted it into their official repositories or are working towards that aim right now. They would not spare the man power if they thought for one minute MATE did not have a future, it must have a future because Pentium 4 machines are not going to last forever and most distros are now standardising on 64bit.

Thank you all, some very good points made and i'm more comfortable with it now.

I especially like the point that Jefro made:
At some point, this old hardware will be useless so that kind of limits the age of the distro to relict status anyway.

With the other comments, it appears Mate will have a long enough life to survive the P4s still out there.

Cheers.

I've come pretty close to saying exactly that.

I still dont see why people love Gnome 2.X that much, it never did anything for me. But as MATE gains ground with several distros, I'm slowly coming around.....That doesnt mean I'll ever suggest it as a desktop, but I'm less of a critic than I was.

In my defence, I have always worried about MATE going the same way as Trinity.

I love it because it works. I have mainly ATI graphics card and have yet to try a Gnome3 distro that didn't have graphics issues. When Gnome3 finally works I might have a go at it!

Gnome 2 when it was stripped to the bare minimum was a good DE, when it had dependencies forced into it (such as Evolution and all its little bits) it was bloated. MATE is now what Gnome 2 should have been, in my opinion anyway. I can choose what I want for mail, music, video, etc etc etc. or I can choose not to have them at all it got difficult to do with Gnome 2.

I read somewhere the other day that Trinity has a new point release. I've never liked KDE, it has its uses but it doesn't float my boat, but Trinity suffers from a lack of manpower just like some distros (e.g. SolusOS) do and did.