So I'm about to start development for a new desktop image and Linux Mint intrigues me.  Mostly because a lot of machines that we have are around 2GB of RAM and Mint only required 512MB.

I currently use a mixture of RHEL 6 and CentOS (various) but was told that Mint has quite a few differences.  I've also tossed around the idea of playing with Ubuntu.

Basically I was hoping to get some input before I go and install 10 VMs on my computer at home.  Also with Mint, is there really that much of a difference between Cinnamon and MATE?  My experience says Cinnamon is more like Windows and MATE more like MAC, but I've never looked into it enough to know the actual difference.