Dad joke time:
Mostly the Aussies!

I do. I've been on MATE for 8 or 9 years now. I like GNOME 2 environment a lot, lightweight, still looks nice, has a "classic" PC interface compared to tabletified looking icons. It just works.

I've been using mate basically forever. Installed it for some people. I like it better than any other.

using mate on my Raspis, moved to cinnamon on anything more powerful

What's better about cinnamon?

I've jumped around a lot. Mate is great and a little more lightweight than some others. I definitely prefer Mate over Xfce. Still like KDE by far far the best, but Mate is my second.

You wot mate?

I am at the moment, but I'm thinking of switching to XFCE.

I switched to Mate originally because Cinnamon always runs out of memory and starts slowing down over time. If they fixed the memory issues I'd probably prefer Cinnamon.

I do! I switched from KDE 3.5 (whenever that was current). I love KDE's approach to making everything adjustable (as opposed to Gnome's "you'll get one button and you better love it") but with KDE 4 on the horizon it seemed to bloat too much for my tastes.

I love how it's a (for me) perfect mix of making a ton of things adjustable while appearing extremely no-frills. Easy on the ram, CPU, and eyes. 👌

I prefer XFCE for lightweight uses (e.g. VM or raspberry Pi) and KDE for normal desktop use.

For me MATE isn't quite light enough for lightweight when XFCE is there, and no where near attractive or pleasant enough for day-to-day use when RAM/CPU use isn't a bottleneck. KDE is certainly more resource intense but up to 1gb of RAM and 1-3% CPU idle for a full featured, slick desktop environment is worth it.

I don't really see the appeal of MATE unless you strongly want a GNOME 2 desktop. In which case, yes it makes sense. Although ironically you can make a very close but modern take on GNOME 2 with KDE with modern bells and whistles if you're willing to customise KDE - it's that flexible.

In the past I've mainly used XFCE or openbox because of my old hardware. A couple years ago I picked a Debian+MATE image to install on a fresh box and have been using it by default since then.

None of that "touchscreen UI uber alles" BS.

Hey me too. Debian + mate

I have a cup of mate every morning, yes.

Mate is one of those desktops that I occasionally consider, and it's definitely something I could see myself using. Mate is certainly a cool project and I hope it stays around. It reminds of my early days with GNOME - before the bad thing happened and darkness descended on that project.

I hope they get Wayland going eventually.

Got Debian with MATE on a couple of my computers. It's easy on the eyes and easy on system resources. I like that its file manager lets you expand folders so I have that installed on my XFCE machines too.

Seagulls in Finding Nemo

I use it, I hate GNOME.

I switched from KDE 3.5 (whenever that was current).

Terrifyingly, I think someone is still maintaining KDE 3.5 proper for OpenSUSE. Then there's TDE, which is widely available. (But you probably mean 15-20 years ago.)

Wasn't MATE forked from GNOME?

GNOME 2, but yes.

MATE exists because people loved GNOME 2 and hated GNOME 3.

It IS the early days of GNOME. MATE started with the source code of the last GNOME 2 release.

I do like it, but I have sadly fallen down the tiling wm rabbit hole. It's too late now.

It has been mostly i3 for me. Not for everyone, but I like the control.

I'm still mad at GNOME 3 and whatever it came afterwards.

Luckily we have MATE.

I thought it was mostly Argentinians

I like LinuxMint's MATE theme rather than default one of gnome2

Tried it a couple of times, wasn't my thing. Last time, I had some more serious issues with it (file manager doing weird stuff), so I tossed it for good.

Also Mate is heavily tied to the whole Ubuntu/Snap thing, so that's a bit yuckie to me.

I love MATE. I left Ubuntu when Unity happened. It just never felt polished to me. I used MATE on and off since gnome 3 and unity. Currently off because I’m finally getting used to Gnome 3. And credit where credit is due, G3 is quite nice these days.

I did use Ubuntu MATE for a while. Quite happy with it but finally couldn't resist the ckall of KDE