I feel I need to be more specific in my answer.
I am using almost none of the default utility that come with Mate, preferring superior, better maintained and accidentally GTK3 applications:
- Mate-terminal --> Tilix
- Atril --> Evince
- EoM --> EoG or Gthumb
- mate-calc --> gnome-calculator
- pluma --> gedit
Gnome-disk is already installed by default and it's great.
I only keep using Caja, because Nautilus really sucks and Nemo is not recent in the repos.
EDIT: I should add Engrampa, for its integration with Caja and because file-roller also sucks after the removal of some features (password setting).
I am feeling it's a dead-end. How the Mate community can continue to keep these forks on par with their newer alteratives?
Apparently, it's not going very well.
On the other side, I regret that some core components (panels, window managers, file browser) suffer from quite important and serious bugs that are not being fixed.
It's maybe an isolated opinion, but I don't care about basic utilities when I choose Mate. I care about having solid and configurable foundations.
Maybe the project should keep its resources to focus of them.