Linux Cinnamon vs. Linux MATE: What’s the Difference?

Cinnamon is all about looking sleek and consistent, while still letting the user pick the thematic inflection they want. Themes, along with other graphical elements like desklet widgets for the desktop and applet widgets for the status bar, can easily be perused and installed from Cinnamon’s Themes menu. If you want to consider more theming options, you can navigate to an online extension “store” that lets you modify Cinnamon while keeping your panel from getting out of control and cluttered.

Between these two methods, you have access to the newest GTK+ 3 themes vying to give Linux a fresh contemporary style. You can also install GTK+ 3 themes on MATE, but Cinnamon is optimized to run them. As Cinnamon is Linux Mint’s flagship, they want it to look the part.

Overall, MATE is leaner and less hardware-intensive than Cinnamon, which makes it generally snappier. The “traditional,” less flashy look of MATE means it doesn’t have to devote as much memory and processing to glossy visual effects, making everything run smoother. The default utility set for MATE also swaps out a few Cinnamon utilities for smaller, simpler alternatives which, again, cuts down on loading lag time for app startup.

While Cinnamon places the customization menus front and center, it presents a somewhat restrictive array of choices. MATE, on the other hand, lets you go wild with whatever tweaks you can imagine. MATE lets you switch things up more piecemeal—instead of applying a single theme over all UI elements the way Cinnamon encourages users to do, MATE lets you go in different directions for the look of menus, window bars, icons and more. For instance, it’s straightforward to configure the MATE panel differently from the rest of the menu UI, whereas Cinnamon really discourages this.

You can also mess around with the window manager, the program at the heart of a desktop environment that dictates how windows are drawn and positioned, in MATE more than in Cinnamon. In fact, Cinnamon only gives you one option, while MATE allows you to choose from a multiple window managers and more than one compositor, a kind of effect drawing engine. One combined window manager-compositor that stands out is Compiz, which lets you delve deep into the graphical effects that adorn moving windows, switching workspaces and much more.

With simple applications, a no-frills interface and tried-and-true GTK+ 2 libraries, MATE is rock-solid. By not trying to do too much, and doing everything well, MATE almost never crashes. Things just work, and if you want them to look nicer and still work, you can do that too.

The unified look and full-featured utilities of Cinnamon make it ideal for a modern computing experience. Every customization portal has a consistent app-store like interface, whether it’s an actual app store or a theming menu, that is instantly familiar to any modern desktop or laptop computer user. Every utility, such as the image or document viewer, is also rich and full-featured, and does not cut down on menu options for the sake of efficient processing, as MATE sometimes does.

This category really depends on your preference. As hinted at above, utilities are the pre-installed apps that allow you to access and manipulate files of all types, administer your system and basically make the desktop useful. If you’re looking for dead simple utilities that never fail, MATE is your best bet. If you want a modern, unabridged set of features and a sleek finish, Cinnamon is what you want.