Hello Linux Geeksters. As you may know, Mate is a Gnome 2 fork, created by the Arch Linux developers as a an alternative to Gnome Classic (Gnome 2), when the Gnome developers decided to create Gnome 3. Mate became very popular in a short time and now is used on many Linux systems. The latest version available is Mate 1.8, which has been released a while ago.
Among others, MATE 1.8 comes with support for window snapping/side-by-side tiling to the window manager, support for both Metacity and Marco windows managers, IEC units support for Caja and better support for GTK +3.
Mate 1.8 is the default DE of Linux Mint 17 Mate. Also, an official Ubuntu Mate flavor may be released, starting with Ubuntu 14.10.
Recently, Mate 1.8 has been added to the default repositories of Debian Wheezy, Debian Jessie and Debian Sid, so installing it on the latest Debian versions is easy. Most likely, the latest version of Mate has been packed for Debian, in order to get it closer to Ubuntu 14.10.
In this article I will show you how to properly install Mate 1.8 on Debian Wheezy, Debian Jessie and Debian Sid.
Install the base packages required for a minimal MATE desktop, on Debian systems:
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install mate-desktop-environment-core
Install the MATE complete desktop, on Debian systems:
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install mate-desktop-environment
Install the MATE complete desktop + some extras, on Debian systems:
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install mate-desktop-environment-extras