MATE

MATE (pronounced to rhyme with latte, not late) is a fork of the GNOME 2 desktop environment by the MATE team, which is available through Portage. According to their manifesto, they aim to keep a traditional desktop look and feel, maintain an open development model, have an open relationship with GNU/Linux distributions, and serve as a good alternative for lower-end hardware.

Keywording
Note that MATE is yet to be keyworded on anything but and. Status of MATE keywording can be tracked in.

USE flags
First enable or disable desired USE flags for.

Emerge
To install the MATE desktop environment run the following command:

As of July 2014, both MATE 1.6 and MATE 1.8 are stable on ; only MATE 1.8 is stable on.

Usage
Either a display manager (SLiM, GDM, LightDM, etc.) or the startx command can be used to start MATE during system the system boot process.

Display manager (DM)
To make the display manager work specify a MATE session (mate-session) in the configuration of the display manager; some perform this action interactively, others will need to have a configuration file modified. The default session can also often be changed by setting  in :

Manual start
To start MATE manually create a file in a user's home directory. Make its contents as follows:

Note that you might need to put ck-launch-session and/or dbus-launch between exec mate-session for ConsoleKit and/or DBUS communication to work, for example:

Compositing
Compositing is not enabled by default. To enable it navigate to run and click the tick box alongside Enable software compositing window manager in the  tab.

Does MATE rely on a specific service manager or init system?
No, MATE has been tested to work with both OpenRC and systemd and might work on other service managers and init systems too (untested, but no known reason for it to break); systemd support was added in release 1.6.

Can MATE be installed side-by-side GNOME packages or do they block?
As the MATE packages use their own categories, it is possible to have MATE and GNOME 3 installed at the same time which allows you to test either; taking it even a step further, if you change MATE to not have a top panel (as it gets hidden under the GNOME 3 shell) you can even start mate-session within GNOME 3 and run MATE and GNOME 3 at the same time.

GLib-GObject-ERROR: object GsmAutostartApp 0x73ca40 finalized while still in-construction
When you get this error (see ~/.materc-errors), it is usually preceded by a warning, fixing the warning could fix the problem; for example, when I get to see:

In this case, you can resolve this by moving away the desktop file or fixing it up by adding the Name key. If you want a clean start, you can move those files out of the way by backing them up:

External resources

 * Arch wiki MATE article.