MATE is a traditional looking desktop environment derived from Gnome 2. It was specially designed for Gnome 2 lovers who did not want to switch to Gnome 3 for several reasons. A new version of MATE is available and it brings numerous changes and bug fixes as given below:

• mate-keyring and libmatekeyring backends updated and now integrate properly
• caja-dropbox package now available
• New themes added to mate-notification-daemon
• Removed indicator-applet-session
• File sharing now available via bluetooth
• Added option to use fast alt-tabbing when compositing is enabled in marco
• mate-icon-theme-faenza now available
• mate-character-map now available
• mate-screensaver now supports GDM user switching
• Removed nyancat from the mate-desktop about dialog
• Forked libwnck (now libmatewnck)
• Caja improvements:
• Restored toggle button for text based location bar
• Bookmarks can now be opened in the places side pane via the enter and space keys
• Added a button to get the difference between files in the file conflict dialog

To install MATE on your Ubuntu based distro, you will need to add a PPA and install it with following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository "deb http://packages.mate-desktop.org/repo/ubuntu precise main"
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install mate-archive-keyring
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install mate-desktop-environment