If I remember correctly both Unity and MATE came out as a response to GNOME 3's launch. GNOME 3 had a lot of bugs and was rightly shunned by the overall Linux c

If I remember correctly both Unity and MATE came out as a response to GNOME 3's launch. GNOME 3 had a lot of bugs and was rightly shunned by the overall Linux community when it came out. Some people decided to fork GNOME 2 and create MATE, Canonical thought it was easier to use the underlying GNOME core to add the features they wanted in their desktop. Both options are free and open source software and nobody is locked into using either of them.