A few days ago version 1.8 of MATE, a fork of GNOME 2.x that offers users one of the more traditional desktop environments.
MATE 1.8 has changes important in the file manager, the window manager, the dashboard, the Control Center, various applets and some other applications. In addition, improvements have been made to the base code of the environment, numerous bugs have been corrected and the translations in which the software is distributed have been improved.
Although MATE 1.8 is not yet available in its official repository - there is still only version 1.6 -, when it is, it can be easily installed in Ubuntu 13.10, Ubuntu 12.04 and probably Ubuntu 14.04. All you have to do is add this repository to our software sources; for this purpose we open a comfort and we execute:
sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mate.list
In the document that opens, within the same terminal, we copy the following repository to Ubuntu 13.10:
deb http://packages.mate-desktop.org/repo/ubuntu saucy main
To Ubuntu 12.04 instead we use this other:
deb http://packages.mate-desktop.org/repo/ubuntu precise main
Later we refresh the local information:
sudo apt-get update
We import the public key:
sudo apt-get --yes --quiet --allow-unauthenticated install mate-archive-keyring
And finally we install MATE:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install mate-core mate-desktop-environment
Once this is done, to log in to MATE we will simply have to choose MATE as the desktop environment on the login screen.