SJVN likes Cinnamon - http://www.zdnet.com...nux-mint-13/11110 , but I've read about teething problems with it (heat, CPU fan running continuously, etc., etc.). http://cinnamon.linuxmint.com/?p=190
I understand that Cinnamon is based on GNOME 3.x while MATE is a fork of 2.x. It looks like all of the versions of Ubuntu I've used are based on GNOME 2.x so I'd probably go with MATE unless there is something I've missed.
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.