I ran MATE for years because I thought the GNOME3 rug-pull redesign was a major step backward. MATE has not really evolved a ton since it was forked from GNOME

I ran MATE for years because I thought the GNOME3 rug-pull redesign was a major step backward. MATE has not really evolved a ton since it was forked from GNOME 2, so I honestly don't see the similarity between Cosmic and MATE. If anything, Cosmic looks to me more like "GNOME 3, but behaves even _more_ like MacOS." If you like real buttons and scollbars, KDE is very nice these days and is MUCH more stable than it used to be.