I have heard that Ubuntu MATE is more lightweight that Ubuntu. My question is does that mean that the first one uses less system resources leaving more of them for use from the user or does it handle all the processes in a different manner too?
What I mean is if I have, let's say, Firefox running with 20 tabs in both Ubuntu MATE and Ubuntu, will there be a difference in the system resources used?
Up to now I thought that Firefox will simply use the same resources in both flavors, but in the first one there will be more of them as the desktop environment is more lightweight.
Ubuntu MATE does handle files and programs just the same as vanilla Ubuntu does. The single difference is, it comes with different windows manager and probably another default software stack. Ubuntu MATE uses Mate whereas Ubuntu uses Unity. The former is said to not use as much memory and cpu/gpu cycles as unity.