Cinnamon or MATE?
 

Which would you recommend: Cinnamon or MATE:
(A friend's machine, not mine: I don't have more detailed specs at hand)
- about 2 years old desktop, powerful, but not state of the art
- basic stuff: net surfing, e-mail, music videos from net, messenger
- some music related SW (Hydrogen, tab-sw, note writing/playing)
- music editing SW
- Music CD burning
- home theater stuff
- maybe Seaclear or something like that (to be used in a laptop too)


What makes me wonder:

I was thinking about HW requirements (3D acceleration), finding working SW and perfo needed for smooth operation.
Also, the future of the DEs is a factor. Which one, you think, will last?
Any idea if either of the DEs is becoming some kind of "de-facto default" in Mint?
How does cinnamon work with less-common graphics cards - has there been a lot of problems?
How's the 2D accelerated cinnamon?

The laptop is (or will be) another issue altogether.

Cinnamon is a modified Gnome 3 (Gnome-Shell), MATE is a fork of the old Gnome 2.

Clem, of Linux Mint fame, has had a lot to do with MATE but seems to have moved away from it and concentrated on modifying Gnome 3. First he had MGSE (Mint Gnome Shell Extensions) which seems to have lasted about 1 year (I never hear of it anymore) and then he went into MATE, and then he started working on Cinnamon. Giving the guy credit he is good at his work but I do wonder at his apparent tendency to chop and change DEs around this last few years.

Both DEs have a following, I personally don't see any advantage in Cinnamon over Gnome 3. It is to me just something to make Gnome shell look like Gnome 2 with some Minty add ons. I think some people are using it in Fedora as well but I don't know if it has gone much further than that. MATE, is getting a decent following among a variety of Linux's Arch, Debian, Ubuntu, Mint, SUSE, Salix just to name a few. I have built a Debian Wheezy based Live USB with it and it works really well so much so I don't use Debian Squeeze much anymore.

So:
(The distro will be Mint due to other reasons)
1) Cinnamon or MATE doesn't really matter SW-wise, but Cinnamon seems to be left as Linux Mint curiosity?
2) Cinnamon doesn't seem to have very long life?
3) DEs are in a boiling state at the moment?
4) At the moment MATE seems to have stronger continuity?

[edit]
Oh, and I really hate unity.

Since both are installed, it's not a choice you have to make until you log in! Tell them to try both and they'll soon make a choice. The reason that both are available is that Clem asked the user community what they wanted (how unlike Mark Shuttleworth); they were divided, so they got both.

MGSE was a temporary fix to make Gnome 3 more acceptable and Cinnamon is the permanent one. It's also available on installation disks for Sabayon and Manjaro, but other distros are making their own customisations of Gnome 3 (Solus and Fuduntu) or changing the default (Debian to Xfce).

Mate is also available on installation disks for Salix, Sabayon, Snow, and DescentOS; Arch and Debian also have packages. If you look at its website, forum, and bug-tracking service, you can see that it has a lot of users and support. I'd say Mate is definitely here to stay.

Truckload of thanks.
So MATE it'll be then.
Nobody knows the future, but sounds like MATE is better bet now.
Fortunately (I understand) less to learn from the older versions of Mint/gnome.