With Ubuntu 12.04, the performance of Unity on my Thinkpad X200 (Core 2 Duo, 8GB RAM) was slow, so I used the Gnome Fallback (which was Gnome 2). With Ubuntu 14.04, Gnome Fallback was no longer available, so I install Mate, and used that an alternative desktop. It mostly stayed out of the way of Unity, and included a different terminal and file manager. I tried Cinnamon, but that caused so many conflicts that I seem to recall having to practically do a reinstall of Ubuntu. Ubuntu 14.04 with a Mate desktop was snappy and productive. With Ubuntu 16.04, Unity performance had improved so much that Mate wasn't really necessary. However, the impending move at Ubuntu 18.04 from Unity has caused me to explore alternative desktops. KDE Plasma 5.9 on top of Ubuntu 16.04 caused issues with LightDM. Rather than fight the issues, I moved to Kubuntu 17.04 (with KDE Plasma 5.9) and was really impressed with performance. I've now moved to Kubuntu 17.10 because an advanced setting for an L2TP VPN was fixed with that. So, if you're looking at coexistence with Gnome 3, my guess is that Mate would causes fewer issues. If the user is coming from a Windows experience, it's worth paying attention to KDE Plasma after version 5.9, as the development processes on the team have changed drastically over the past 2 years. The desktop team now works primarily on KDE Neon (frequent updates to KDE on an Ubuntu LTS base), and there seems to be enough crossover members so that Kubuntu (at the non-LTS version) gets integrated and updated. If the user is coming from a Mac experience, I now recommend Deepin Linux, which is a complete desktop environment (centered out of Wuhan, China) built on top of Debian unstable. I had tried Manjaro Deepin, but Arch wasn't playing well with Grub on a triple-boot laptop. A casual Mac user would probably prefer the integration in Deepin Linux, while the hard core developer coming from a Mac might prefer the depth of Arch repositories available via Manjaro Deepin. This reports on my experiments in 2017. I have a colleague from Finland who is on an assignment in China, so my computer support for her needs to be bulletproof. On Sat, Dec 16, 2017 at 11:10 AM, D. Hugh Redelmeier via talk < talk@gtalug.org> wrote:

[Second try at posting this to the list.]

In my world (mostly Fedora), the normal desktop is Gnome3, including its shell.

Sometimes people ask me for a good old desktop, and I know the answer must be MATE or Cinnamon.

Originally MATE was a fork of GNOME 2 and so I assumed that it would conflict with an already-installed Gnome 3 in some ways.

Since Cinnamon was a fork of Gnome 3, I similarly assumed it would co-exist well with Gnome 3.

I'm not sure of that any longer after reading the wikipedia pages.

Some criteria for co-existance:

- (pretty basic) can both be installed at one time. So no make conflicts.

- (asperational) installed GNOME applications can run under the other shell

- (asperational) installed applications for the other environment can run under the GNOME Shell

Most comparisons are old. Here's a recent one, but it doesn't seem that useful: <https://www.slant.co/versus/1123/1125/~mate_vs_cinnamon> --- Talk Mailing List talk@gtalug.org https://gtalug.org/mailman/listinfo/talk