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 ...
