I know this is a bit pedantic, but I'm curious. I assumed MATE was an acronym since it's all caps. But the MATE desktop project page says it's named after the plant "maté". Then why is every letter capitalized? If it's not an acronym, then all caps indicates yelling. Like "MATE!"
Does anyone know why "MATE" is all-caps?
Thanks
Thank you for the info!
GNOME was originally an acronym for GNU Network Object Model Environment although they dropped this meaning later, they kept writing it in caps. MATE is the continuation of GNOME 2 and - as traditional as MATE intended to be - they also kept using caps
Also to clarify, the correct way to pronounce MATE is "MA te" (2 syllables), like the yerba mate plant (which also explains the prominently green themes).
Note that there's no accent in the word mate, otherwise it would be pronounced "ma TE", which means "I killed" in Spanish.
The *nix world is full of fun recursive backronyms, and MATE is no exception: MATE uses MATE Advanced Traditional Environment
Wikipedia says the following about yerba mate:
In English, " mate " is occasionally written " maté " to distinguish it from other meanings of the word mate. However, this spelling is incorrect in Spanish and Portuguese
So in an English context it could be (or maybe it should be) spelled Maté and in another language, where MATE would be pronounced as it should be it's spelled Mate. Both to avoid confusion to other existing words/phrases - "I killed" in Spanish and the already existing English word "mate" - and make it more understandable
Cora
I cringe every time I see it spelled maté. I live in the United States, but Spanish is my first language (I'm from Puerto Rico), and I grew up drinking mate from an early age (my stepfather is from Uruguay).
I would much rather risk someone saying mate with the English pronunciation (single syllable), than having the "I killed" spelling. It's just wrong. If we're going to break language rules for the sake of avoiding confusion, I would encourage the spelling "máte" instead. It is very obviously wrong (breaks accentuation rules in Spanish), but forces the correct pronunciation of the word.
Like Java, MATE is named after a tasty caffeinated beverage!
And it's a tasty desktop!
I live in Australia and I thought it has to do with the Aussie "Mate" but when I found maté, I thought of the hideous job of an autocorrector. Spanish is my native language as well and that spelling is not right. The spoken accent is in the "a" but due to grammar rules, it doesn have an accent mark or tilde as we would say in Spanish.
How does MATE sounds? it is mahteh 
.
Cheers
Good explanation by @vkareh and @mazinger. I'm a Brit fluent only in English and American (lived in USA for ~ half my life), but now struggling to learn Spanish as a 2nd/3rd language. 
To clarify that sentence for non-Spanish speakers from my non-Spanish speaking viewpoint: IIUIC once you know that mate is a Spanish word you'd only pronounce it as @mazinger said: 'mah-teh' (or maah-teh, because for simple 2-syllable words like mate the default rule is always to stress the penultimate vowel, hence the 'a' is stressed (longer) vowel anyway so it never needs an accent mark on it. The accents in Spanish are only used when some other vowel - instead of the default one - needs to be the accented one, like the maté example ('ma-tay' - translation 'I killed').
Note I said for 2-syllable words. Once you get to more than 2 it gets very complicated very quickly, because the rules, like most of Spanish spelling/pronunciation rules, are very consistent (compared to say English) and depending on the relative position of the syllable in the word, but ... numbered from the end backwards towards the front. A little subtly that they never tell you in Spanish class because, well, it's just a natural way in Spanish.
And @mazinger 's reference to 'an accent mark or tilde" is interesting too. When he says tilde we English speakers just think of the symbol also used to mean approximately as in ~2. But tilde in Spanish, as I understand it, means an accented letter, any accent not just the ~= one. This nugget of confusion was caused by the English language, which when faced with needing to name that Spanish accent which didn't exist in English went "Well it's a Spanish accent, and they call accents tidle, so we'll just call it that!". Not too helpful
Yes, Spanish is not like French that has so several types of accents like ‘ ` ^
But that little symbol makes out life easier when you know the rules. For example it is orégano and not oregano.