THE PROBLEM
Creating a panel or desktop launcher of type: “Application in Terminal” has had some strangeness for quite a while. I just found 16.04 (beta 2) has xterm default installed so it gets used. This may be a good solution for many reasons, but can we get mate-terminal to run, instead?
I discovered the problem is a glib interpretation of the .desktop launcher category for the terminal - so a little difficult to fix. It will execute xterm, if present, and others including gnome-terminal but not mate-terminal (yet?).
MY SOLUTION
There’s many solutions, including forgetting the “Application in Terminal” altogether and just run mate-terminal with the -e option but I wanted to have my cake and eat it, too. And it’s a one-time command:
sudo ln /usr/bin/mate-terminal /usr/bin/gnome-terminal
Viola! This creates a gnome-terminal hardlink pointing to mate-terminal. You will, of course, get an error if gnome-terminal happens to be installed but then you’d probably be happy with gnome-terminal already and not doing this.
All Comments Welcomed. Got a simpler solution?