I've been trying Ubuntu MATE 20.04.2 in VirtualBox for the past few days. It's pretty great and my favourite Ubuntu flavour, but I am facing a small issue with the Quit button in MATE menu. Every time I click Quit, the pointer starts spinning and the desktop stops responding for about 20 secs. There's an app called mate-session-save starting in these 20 seconds. Once the "starting" message disappears from the panel, I am able to shutdown, reboot or whatever from the Quit menu. Any ideas on what is happening here? Not a big issue, but it'd be nice to have this not happen.
Since on VM, what does it do on a live USB boot? There are always some quirks on a virtual machine. 
No issues during a live boot. Definitely seems like a VM quirk. I'm planning to install Linux on my parents' PC when I next visit them, and Ubuntu MATE with the "Redmond" layout looks like the best option to me.
Great! That’s the nice part about Ubuntu Mate…it has several layouts like Redmond, Pantheon, and more that make it look unique/modern. Furthermore, you can tweak it some more to your liking. The latest LTS 20.04 for your parents is a solid stable choice. So you know, Solus makes a great Mate distribution also which I think is the only other Mate distribution that comes close to Ubuntu Mate in my opinion. Although Solus is a rolling release, they do a good job at being very conservative making it a very stable/reliable rolling release. Good luck! 
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Definitely seems like a VM quirk.
hmm - not to me it doesn't, and I have plenty of 20.04 VMs. It's far more likely that there's something iffy in that specific guest.
For your purposes it doesn't matter either way, as either I'm wrong or the chances of you hitting the same issue again are probably very slim.
I disagree that 20.04 is a good choice. While nearly every version of MA^H^H pretty much anything 
always seems to end up with at least one nasty bug, 20.04 is worse than most. Depending on how often you visit, you'd probably be better off with 18.04 (with HWE if necessary) and hoping that 22.04 is good.
(Which reminds me, make sure you remember to set distro updates to "Never"!)
That's definitely MATE's appeal to me. I don't mean to dump on other DEs and they all have their strengths, but I personally feel like MATE would be the most comfortable choice for my dad.
Also, I haven't strayed too far outside Ubuntu when it comes to Linux, but Solus looks great and I will be taking it for a spin soon!
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Sorry I have no idea what MA^H^H is but I will look into it. Is it true that an LTS release is still buggy after a year of release? I haven't faced any problems except the one above. Also, isn't 18.04 already out of support except main Ubuntu? I'd prefer things to stay updated (with security patches, not feature updates) and the latest LTS seems like the way to go for that.
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You are correct. 3 years support for the LTS for other officially supported Ubuntu versions like Xubuntu, Kubuntu, Lubuntu, etc. while the main Ubuntu gets 5 years of support in the LTS.
Which release?
- Choose an LTS (Long Term Release) if you prefer stability. These are supported for 3 years with a new upgrade available every 2 years.
- Choose a non-LTS (interim) release if you like the latest features. These are released more frequently (every 6 months) but are only supported for 9 months.
Both releases equally receive security updates provided by the Ubuntu team. You may upgrade from an LTS to a non-LTS releases by changing your preferences in the Software & Updatesapplication.
Sorry: that was a joke that went over your head. The "MA" was the first 2 letters in MATE, and the "^H" is the backspace key. i.e. the sentence would have read "of MATE", but was changed to read "of anything", because it's endemic to nearly all software, not MATE specifically.
18.04 is "out of support" only in the sense that it won't get new versions of MATE-specific programs. Which realistically makes no difference at all, since MATE doesn't do post-release patches for anything anyway.
And yes, most of the bugs in 20.04 are still there even a year later, because they're either issues in MATE components (which, as you've just learned don't get updated after a release), or in GTK (which basically never gets bugfixes at all).