14 DAY TRIAL // Debian maintainers for MATE have announced that all the packages for the latest 1.10 branch of the desktop environment have been uploaded into the repositories for Debian unstable.
By default, Debian ships with GNOME, but there were some discussions a while back about adopting Xfce. That didn't happen, but given the speed of which MATE seems to be moving, it wouldn't be entirely impossible to see some changes in the Debian project.
“Yesterday, I uploaded the last missing piece for fully having MATE Desktop Environment 1.10 in Debian unstable and soon in Debian stretch and Ubuntu 15.10. Providing MATE in Debian is, in the first place, a team effort. People from four Linux distributions plus the developers from upstream work on providing the MATE experience to the users of Debian,” wrote one of the Debian maintainers.
The fact that the MATE developers are also working as maintainers for various distros puts them in a great position. This is the reason why MATE 1.10 has landed simultaneously in multiple repositories and why it seems to have so much success in the past few months.
If we just take a look at Ubuntu MATE, for example, which is also getting the 1.10 treatment, we'll see that MATE fans are on the rise and that more and more people are finding everything they need in this desktop.
Update: The title said Ubuntu Stretch when it should have said Debian Stretch.