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I run MATE on Debian. MATE has the right trade-offs for me. Not too heavy, not too light. GNOME seems to take more and more resources to do less and less. Icewm

I run MATE on Debian. MATE has the right trade-offs for me. Not too heavy, not too light. GNOME seems to take more and more resources to do less and less. Icewm requires too much customisation. Icewm is an interesting wm. At first it has an ugly 90's retro aesthetic, but it grows on you after a little while. Switching back to "proper" DEs makes them look a little too sugary.

lproven 4y ago
For me the killer failing of MATE is that it does not and cannot handle vertical taskbars right. GNOME 2 couldn't and MATE still can't. (LXDE did; LXQt can't either. Sadly, it could before it reached v1.0 but it's now broken.) Xfce does this with aplomb. In my testing (I wrote the article at the top of this thread) it is also substantially more stable; I regularly experience crashes in MATE. Here's what it should look like: https://imgur.com/gallery/fLeAy https://imgur.com/gallery/fLeAy This is what it looks like when MATE tries: https://imgur.com/dBfjico https://imgur.com/dBfjico That's not a bit poor or sub-optimal: that is broken and unusable. MATE is also orphaned; the team that created GNOME 2 have moved on, and it's a substantial codebase to maintain. Xfce is smaller, faster, more stable, and does more. For me, that is game over. YMMV.