Sure, MATE has evolved to give more options, and distros seem to like defaulting its look to something non-traditional, but the traditional look is still very GNOME2 and very much alive. I've got an old desktop from 2009 that's run Gentoo the whole time , I never upgraded to GNOME3, but I did switch to MATE when it came out, and haven't had to mess with it since apart from trying out different icon sets or other small theme changes. It looks basically the same as ever, even compared to my old laptop screenshots from 2007 -- I still have my wobbly windows from Compiz (fka Beryl) too.
TBH, both Ubuntu and Gnome have completely lost my trust as far as making stable and predictable environments.
The Mac-like global menubar which they've grafted on without being able to adopt the applications is an atrocity IMO.
I consider Windows 95 / NT4 / 2000 to be "peak desktop GUI" and use distros which allow me to emulate that look, feel, and behavior. I use it until it fails to deliver that experience and then keep trying other distros until I find another one who has not yet rotted out.
So far, I have only had to switch distros a handful of times.
Windows 2000 was a thing of beauty. It was Peak Gates. What do you think of SerenityOS? It's written by this guy from Apple who ended up leaving his job so he could do the same thing to Windows 2000 that Steve Jobs did to Mac OS 9. Now that's a dangerous idea.
I'm a huge fan of SerenityOS and Andreas, but I've not had a chance to try it yet.
I used Windows 2000 starting three betas before gold, downloading each build over dialup from AOL warez scene releases and didn't stop until a while after they stopped patching Pro, don't recall having any issues. What an amazingly solid OS.
My choice today is Xfce with the Chicago95 script, I can barely tell the difference.
I'd say Mint has the best default tuning for Xfce, with Manjaro I have to add the fewest additional packages on top of the base install, and Fedora is somewhere in between.
