MATE 1.6, gnome 2 fork Desktop is officially available on Ubuntu 14.04 repositories. A user can now install the MATE desktop environment straight from the Ubuntu Software Centre. So a ubuntu 14.04 user can use the conventional Gnome 2 environment by just installing the MATE. Now there is no package conflicts with Unity so it will run smoothly in Ubuntu 14.04.
Other Desktop environments available within Ubuntu 14.04 include Cinnamon and GNOME 3′s ‘fallback session’.
About MATE DE
MATE is a fork of GNOME 2 desktop environment, giving a traditional gnome user interface that works fine with or without hardware acceleration and display compositing. It is created by forking GNOME 2, and most of its in-house apps are based on their GNOME 2 counterparts, Caja is based on Nautilus 2.x, Pluma on Gedit 2.x, and so on.
Install MATE 1.6 on Ubuntu 13.10
Press Ctrl+Alt+T (Open the termial). then copy paste the following commands. Add a Repo to the system and install mate.
sudo add-apt-repository "deb http://repo.mate-desktop.org/ubuntu (lsb_release -sc) main" sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get --yes --quiet --allow-unauthenticated install mate-archive-keyring sudo apt-get update
You now have the choice to install the MATE base packages only or the full MATE system.
For the base packages only, use this command:
sudo apt-get install mate-core
For the full MATE system, use this command:
sudo apt-get install mate-desktop-environment