MATE is a fork of GNOME 2.

It provides an intuitive and attractive desktop to users using
traditional metaphors.

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Where does the name come from?

The name "MATE" comes from yerba mate, a species of holly native
to subtropical South America. Its leaves contain caffeine and are
used to make infusions and a beverage called mate.

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This metaport installs MATE base (lite, a lean desktop) plus
extras applications such as text editor, archiver manager and
etc. If you do not want to have the bloats, please install
x11/mate-base.

WWW: http://www.FreeBSD.org/gnome/