Overall a fairly positive review and pleasing Jessie Smith spent time describing the Welcome Screen and Software Boutique. Personally, his experience with VirtualBox is nebulous to me and after installing UM upon a variety of machines, I’ve not experienced a single issue he described.
I use U_MATE on all my machines and never see any problem like what he described.
My only complaint was a visual one, specifically that the Welcome application features globs of green snow that fall across the screen. It’s a bit distracting and not visually appealing in my opinion.
Green snow. 
Confetti only appears for a handful of the 365 days in the year as a celebration. There’s still room for improvements for the welcome experience. 
I'm very proud of the ram usage of the U_MATE. Really resource saving!
I thought the review was very good despite Jesse encountering hardware problems. I have Ubuntu Mate installed on 4 machines and never encountered any problems myself.
Jesse highlighted many of Ubuntu Mate’s strong points and in his conclusion he said that he had a positive experience with the new release.
On my desktop, running U_MATE makes my CPU nearly ten degrees lower than running Win10.
However, my laptop (newer than the desktop) has a higher temperature when running U_MATE.....
I also want to tip my hat to the default theme used on Ubuntu MATE. The desktop’s darker backgrounds with white text and colourful icons were much easier on my eyes than the transparent or grey-on-grey themes some projects use. Seeing full, detailed icons rather than vague, abstract shapes was a nice touch too. I feel too many modern themes look like they are designed to intentionally cause eye strain and Ubuntu MATE’s high-contrast, colourful look made it easier for me to read the menus and find the controls I wanted to access.
This gets praise for the default theme, although true it is quite good the issue is that light green is not easy on the eye and there is no easy way to escape it completely even after tweaking the theme in the GUI. I like the default theme so essentially I had to edit the metacity-theme-1.xml file and change the color from light green to standard ubuntu orange or dark blue because it is just unusable on old low contrast monitors. For the novice user there should be some way to have a official variation to the default theme - without the light green everywhere in the menues. Is there anyone who would like to vote with me on that?!
Well, since Ambiant-MATE is a greener variant of Ambiance (Ubuntu), installing the Ambiance Colours theme may be the easiest option for that. 
This worked great! Is there something similar to change the icon designs? When changing to these color themes, the Ubuntu MATE launcher button changes to the one from the Unity desktop environment. Is it possible to prevent this?
You can click “Customize” and use a different icon theme (Ambiant-MATE) to the one used by the theme.
The same creators have coloured Humanity icons too!
http://www.ravefinity.com/p/humanity-colors-icon-theme.html