[Rooster61]

This is why I personally like MATE. I remember when they switched from Gnome 2 to Unity, and I just stopped using Ubuntu until I discovered Mint, which I installed with MATE and the rest was history.

I've moved on from Mint, but the fact that the MATE dev community took the tried and true paradigms learned from Gnome 2 and made kept them alive in spirit won me over. I installed Ubuntu MATE to a box just the other day.

[freedomben]

Ubuntu MATE is a phenomenal distro. For VMs and lower resource machines it is always my go to.

Not to imply that it isn't valuable on high end machines (it is), but I personally really like Gnome 3 these days once I got used to it's way of doing things.

[thaumasiotes]

I remember the switch. That's when I switched from Ubuntu to Xubuntu, where I still am.