http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/cinnamon-mate-future.html
I am not the author of that article, but I quite enjoyed it reading! I think he gets to the point about the whole desktop environment world 
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Yes, i would like to read more article like this today.
Gnome3 is getting better day after day, KDE too ā¦ but MATE is still here at its best, and i think iāll still loving using it =) There isnāt a perfect DE but Ubuntu MATE show to all what is a good example !!! 
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This article is four years old - a terrific predictor of today, through the future. Obviously, the author couldnāt have known that Canonical would eventually relent on its insistence that us traditionalists would all ultimately be transformed into Unity adorers. Of course instead, thankfully, we were presented with an official landmark distro to call our own, again. And, hence, the old king has been in the process of retooling itself into the new king.
When I was young, here in the American South, we had CocaCola; and we drank few other softdrinks. One day some naive well-wisher took away our CocaCola and replaced it with the awful tasting āNEW Coke.ā The rest of story unfolded in a very similar fashion to what we have now have with our beloved MATE; itās just called CocaCola Classic in this case. You just cannot stifle the thing that proves to do the best job - no matter the gimmicks and marketing strategy. 
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To Add if you go through the PHR ratings in distrowatch that proves the point. The surge of Mint and distros offering more choices of alternative DEs (Debian,Arch) even forcing others to offer spins e.g(ubuntu flavours and fedora spins). Fedora magazines coverage of how do you use fedora also showed a great liking towards traditional DEsā¦
Personal experience: I had difficulties with MTP with xfce and even with modern DEs like plasma, gnome3, pantheon and budgie. But MATE offers everything out of the box and everything just works thanks to gnome 2 baseā¦
PS: I know PHR is doesnot indicate actual no of usage but it is a great indicator of popularity and its past history has proved it is true indicator of popularityā¦
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My first experience with GNOME 2 was on Sun Solaris thin client. I found it to be great even with the limitations of not being run on the āreal computerā, this inspired me to try Ubuntu on my own PC (before it used Unity). Needless to say, it is the most productive computer environment, being only surpassed by i3wm - but i3 is not really suitable if you want to share PC with someone who isnāt familiar with it. Btw Cinnamon is also great, but tweakability of MATE makes it a better choice for my needs.
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KDE 1 has some of the spirit of GNOME2&MATE in its KDE 1 restoration project [1], I wish that it was more popular. Anyone here having some experience of running KDE in it version 1 days?
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Not me; but I can relate, @linuxhandbok. This one is gaining a tad of popularity (fork of KDE 3.5). I built one last week; and I have to say that - other than some Compiz issues - I fell in love with it. If there was no Mate, and I did not mind a little heavier setup, this would be a possibility. 
I canāt deal with modern plasma, or any of the gnome3 reworks either - though Budgie is almost tolerable - and the new Trinity DE (KDE 3.5 fork) has a lot of promise. In general, they just make no sense for either productivity or play to me. To be fair, Xfce & LXDE have served their proposes for me in the past; but people are discovering/rediscovering (including myself) that MATE is the apex of what it takes to balance out the massesā diverse computer needs. Every month, or so, I will cobble together enough of a package list to build the latest newfangled fork, or whatever, that peaks my interest. Most work fine; but without fail, they only end up confirming that we really already have what we want. The poor olā jilted gnome2 has become a genuine phenomena again; and I couldnāt be happier. 
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