> MATE, on the other hand, was/is fantastic. GNOME 2 already was just about perfect for me, and though I was willing to give Unity a try, I was disappointed tha

> MATE, on the other hand, was/is fantastic. GNOME 2 already was just about perfect for me, and though I was willing to give Unity a try, I was disappointed that it was so different from GNOME. MATE filled that void in my heart like no other DE could. I'm a MATE user presently, and I have to agree with this. It does what I need with minimal BS. Unity, in particular, felt to me like a Linux DE trying to be OS X, but not really succeeding at it. (I'm not particular fond of OS X, either; I don't really don't care for the single-menu-at-the-top paradigm and the icon dock on the side never seemed to really work right.) But hey, it's Linux. IDK about Ubuntu these days, but in Gentoo (what I use presently), you can pretty much run whatever DE you want. If people want OS X-ish, that's their choice.