I tried many Ubuntu flavors, Mint Cinnamon, Fedora, GNOME, Manjaro, ElementaryOS, but I don't know why I always return to Ubuntu Mate even if it has old themes.
I think memory management and having stable desktop is really important and always win over all those shiny new desktop manager.
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Function always beats form, when push comes to shove.
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Yes, I also seem to come back to Ubuntu Mate even though Mint Mate looks better. As said, function is most important, as well as the possibility of upgrading twice a year. However, it should not be a big deal to get artists to create more themes, icons, backgrounds etc.
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I disagree. Ubuntu MATE is the only distro that has brought forward themes from the Gnome 2 era. Without MATE those themes would be gone. MATE devs spent money to get those ported to various GTK3 versions. You don't like these themes. I think they look better than anything that has been created in the past five years. How many desktop environments come with as many themes by default and these are not all:
Ambiant-MATE
Ambiant-MATE-Dark
BlackMATE
BlueMenta
Blue-Submarine
GreenLaguna
Green-Submarine
Menta
Radiant-MATE
Redmond
TraditionalGreen
TraditionalOk
I agree that the Mint-Y theme looks decent. I think it lacks a little contrast, but it's more usable than most modern themes. If you want it on Ubuntu MATE you can download it from here:
It looks great with Ambiant-MATE icons!
Ubuntu MATE has the best icon themes too 
I use Xfce these days, but first thing I do is to download all the themes/icons from MATE. No other desktop environment offers as many!
If you want "modern" icons take a closer look at Suru++. It's incredible complete with thousands of icons.
Don't forget that no matter what themes/icons come with your distro you can always customize it to your liking by downloading other themes/icons more to your liking. 
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Have you ever used the built in ElementaryOS or Cinnamon themes ?
Cinnamon uses Mint-Y as far as I know so yes, I'm using Mint-Y right now. I haven't used the Elementary GTK theme. I didn't like it enough to bother finding it and installing it. There are nicer looking Elementary-like GTK themes I think. This one for example:
I do use the Elementary icons. Elementary-Xfce iconpack is great and works well in MATE too.
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Switching between workspaces with one click is a huge efficiency that is not easy with Gnome now. I guess it's the old applets that can be easily added to the panel and SEEN. CPU, memory and network... who doesn't want to know what these guys are doing?
Yeah you are right, GNOME and Cinnamon use JavaScript which is fast for developing shiny desktop UIs but eats memory ans CPU like hungry fat elephant.
Hmm.. more a matter of personal preference and taste than disagreement. Interesting point though, mrtribute, indeed the Gnome2 themes library was impressive, tens, maybe more than a hundred themes, with custom options, etc. In those days there was a distro called Mandrake (then changed to Mandriva) that made good packaging of Gnome2. In those days there was quite a competition between Gnome and KDE to come up with the best looking interface to Linux.
Correct me if I am wrong, but to my understanding the bulk of Gnome2 themes were never ported to Mate/GTK 3?
so do i 
... ubuntu-mate is the best desktop
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Yes, I agree. 
That may happen again now that LXQT has come quite far as a simpler alternative to KDE and strengthening the QT side.
Correct. And many GTK3 themes don’t work anymore because of GTK3 changes. That’s why I wanted to highlight that MATE has brought many themes forward. With Cinnamon you get 2 themes, with Xfce 2 themes, Gnome maybe 2 themes and Elementary 1 theme. MATE and Ubuntu MATE give you more themes out of the box.
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(I like the Windows Vista theme, & Windows 10 icons)
(the github.com/B00merang-Project is quite limited)
The first 3 websites above, have 1000s of themes,including Windows themes,
that work in Ubuntu Mate.
I have used Ubuntu Mate 19.04 and liked it very much, although I do like gnome-shell extensions.
Currently I am using Ubuntu Gnome 18.04,
with Nemo as file and desktop manager,
cairo-dock as my main menu and dock (I made it transparent),
with Windows Vista theme & Windows 10 icons.
This could also be done on Ubuntu Mate. (with some tweaking)
I recommend cairo-dock as the most versatile menu and dock ever.
It has functional adjustment icons for audio, brightness, weather, etc.
I have not even touched the awesome potential of cairo-dock.
I wished that someone would continue to develop it.
I do believe that cairo-dock may have some dependencies from nautilus, although it does not need the nautilus file manager itself.
One can even use Nemo as a file explorer and manager in Ubuntu Mate, along with Caja.
Cairo Dock could be an option for Ubuntu Mate, If one wanted more flexibility.
I once did this to UM, for a laugh
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But why? I use to be all over that, and I might want to give it another try in 19.04, to add the non-Cinnamon dep repo from Webupd8 but completely replacing Caja with Nemo and keeping it relatively lightweight is a pain in the ass and you don't even get to exercise all of its features.
I like Caja and I like Nemo, I would not replace Nemo with Caja, I only wanted to compare Caja and Nemo.
The only time I would use Nemo as a primary file and desktop manager would be in Ubuntu Gnome 18.04.
There I would replace Nautilus with Nemo completely.
However, any newer version of Ubuntu Gnome, especially Ubuntu Gnome 19.04 does not allow these modifications, as they have eliminated the file manager run desktop and have severely limited desktop usage.
Ubuntu Mate 19.04 is just fine with Caja.
I just wanted to experiment with Nemo.
I also wanted to try cairo-dock with Mate, since I really like the awesome options and configurability of cairo-dock. Mate seems to lack weather and brightness apps in the taskbar and or dock.