A packaging/fork issue of Cinnamon resulted in a massive GNOME bug in Mageia. Basically Cinnamon didn't rename something, resulting in the auto provides/dependencies getting screwed up. At the moment there are only GNOME and KDE live cds, no MATE and no Cinnamon. To be clear: I help with Mageia and my interest is solely GNOME, as long as GNOME works I don't want to know what else is available or happening :) Cinnamon breaking GNOME (didn't start up) obviously was not something I want though ;)
I noticed MATE packaging in Fedora and Opensuse. Also Unity, but there often they packaged forked projects... which IMO is just wrong.
In any case, GNOME 2 is dead. Maybe future is MATE.. but nobody picked up on GNOME 2 (they could've, I've offered git accounts in the past).