Ding Ding Ding
In the blue corner, weighing at 400MB ram or less in usage. XFCE with a easy to use UI and light footprint. It has a good file manager and pretty much is the go to standard if you want a cinnamon windows like desktop but less weight for old machines and netbooks.
In the green corner, the ancestor of Gnome 3, born out of hatred for its future counterpart, we have MATE. MATE is also a lean desktop and is easily customizable using different panels if you were a mac, windows or unity desktop user. Without bias I exclusively use this on Ubuntu MATE for a laptop between me and my brother.
Which contender in the desktop ring do you prefer? Why? What’s the positives and negatives for you?
Round 1, GO!
I have used both as Ubuntu flavours when I needed a lighter desktop on older hardware. XFCE was absolutely solid, worked and brought new life to the hardware. But, I wanted just a little more pizazz so, I moved to Mate. It was just as quick, felt a bit more modern but it wasn’t as rock solid as XFCE. XFCE is perfect for stability. Mate is more modern but younger so maybe not as solid. It’s been a while since I took either out for a spin though. Time to fire up the VirtualBox I suppose.