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>