No.
Allow me to be the contrarian here for a moment. It use to be the case that MATE was the king of power-sipping, for a full-fat desktop. Over time, as integration of GTK3 libraries and iterations of MATE continued it has slowly gained feature creep and suck down more power in the process.
Now if you are playing video games or doing intensive web browsing all day, your DE is not going to make a lick of difference except for idle state. If you have to be online at all times, I would recommend LXDE or XFCE as less intensive, and more simple interfaces. With the right stuff assigned to systemd, once well-tuned so there is nothing producing excessive errors and warnings every time you launch something, very little log files will be generated, which means very little will be asked of the processor and media hosting the system to handle.
For touchscreen... yeah, I've not had much fun using MATE with touch devices, but this may be my error, and this will carry over into interfaces not optimized for touch. Anything which includes touch functionality will inherently drain battery faster for whatever device coordinates your touch to absolute X / Y on the display.
About @Norbert_X's claims of productivity, notice the context — He's been using computers for fifteen years, which means he's probably use to WIndows XP / 7. MATE emulates this rather nicely, but also MATE emulates early Mac OS X from what I've heard to some degree. MATE on Ubuntu MATE also ships with a whole host of other software allowing you to optimize the interface to your liking, but this can cause battery drain with extra processor clock cycles.
Here are some legitimate ways to improve power consumption on any laptop / notebook:
- Don't opt for touch models if you can help it — Most hardly use it.
- If display is OLED, use a black desktop background and have no icons on desktop.
— Edit: Any colour is any light. But OLED is especially impacted.
— Additionally, dark-mode everything. Less light, less power.
— Also use as small a font as you can read, with elements only as large as necessary.
- Again, less light = less power draw.
- Use at a brightness you can see, but not any brighter.
- Keep the keyboard backlight disabled, except in the dark without external light.
— If RGB, always use red light. Regardless, use most dim setting in the dark.
- This is because in most diode clusters, red draws the least power.
— Red is also de-facto digital clock colour for ease of strain on the eyes.
— If possible, rather than LED use glow-in-the-dark keycaps / key sticker overlays.
- Always hibernate if not using or watching anything over an extended period.
— This mandates swap partition is available for hibernation to even be possible.
- Always use an SSD. HDDs draw more power regardless of their capability.
So while yes, MATE is my preference, it may not meet all of your needs, and the above are legit tips for reducing overall power usage in long-term battery use scenarios — regardless of shell.
