At least with some older release MATE team was forking some system libraries which caused it to be incompatible with actual releases. Which in turn meant that w

At least with some older release MATE team was forking some system libraries which caused it to be incompatible with actual releases. Which in turn meant that when a critical security flaw was found and patched the patch couldn't be taken into use in MATE systems since it would break all software delivered with the image. I suspect things have since been fixed, but just something to make sure before you start to use the distro.