I backed up everything to a flash drive yesterday and did a fresh install. After installing the nvidia proprietary driver the panel nvidia applet is not working. I told it to report error and ignore it. The driver is working fine and I could really care less if I have the panel applet. The settings can be accessed from the menu. The only other issue so far is Tilda not being set in startup applications after install. I prefer a drop down terminal. That was an easy fix just added it to the startup applications.
Not a fan of compiz so nothing to report there. I switched to Marco GPU compositing from software compositing, removed the bottom panel, switched to the Greenlaguna theme and used my own picture for the background to personalize the desktop to my taste. Switched the lightdm background to another picture I had and moved the log on menu to bottom center.
First impressions so far is that features to enhance the distro and make it new user friendly have been improved on.
Edit------> OK Firefox is locked to Ubuntu Mate start page. A little issue that couldn’t be fixed using preferences in Firefox or about:config or purging Firefox and reinstalling it. I don’t mind a little branding, but hijacked or hard coded browser preferences are a deal breaker. Below is the solution that worked, but shouldn’t have had to be used. I find one more issue like this and and I will be doing a fresh install with a different distribution.
Solution was ->
sudo apt purge firefox*
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:mozillateam/firefox-next
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install firefox