For general knowledge, here are some things I bumped into when installing a clean 15.10 Mate. Some are/were issues, others were preferences. I’m a heavy Compiz user, with a highly tweaked profile - I keep different sets of applications running on different faces of the cube. So many of these items are only going to be issues for a few people if any.
First, I’m very happy to be moving all of my machines to Mate - it’s really been frustrating to deal with Ubuntu’s wet dreams the last two or three years, and Mate is really bringing me back to a solid environment that I can stick with. So kudos to the team! 
FYI, I export my CCSM preferences whenever I make a change I want to keep permanent, so I can just import the preferences again.
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I miss Emerald - my environment was strongly adapted, but … I got a reasonable desktop set up after tweaking the Mate theme and panels etc. I think the only thing I really still miss is transparency of the window frame (and my old Emerald theme, of course). No Mate themes seem to support that, but I could be wrong.
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IMHO the Mate Appearance/theme editor lacks a lot of customization that I’d like to have. But I’m aware that most people would just be confused if it were there.
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middle button did not work to rotate the Cube. In my old setup, when in a window the middle button acted like a regular middle button, but outside of a window it rotated the Cube. As far as I can tell, Mate does not support this context-switching (I’m not sure how I got it working that way on my old system). I tried a dozen or so different alternatives using Mate Tweak, and somehow during this process I managed to get Rotate Cube working with the middle button - but now I can’t use the middle button to do X11 Paste, since the context switching isn’t there. I can, of course, use the Edit menu copy/paste so that’s OK. For me, the ability to rotate the cube with only the mouse is important - the keyboard is often out of reach or my other hand is busy with something else.
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After basic installation with a ‘new’ user setup, I moved my old user account over to the new machine. Now there are some duplicate items in the menus, some of which don’t work, often because the app hasn’t been installed yet - fair enough!
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My workstation is set up with a fixed IP address. When I was first installing 15.10 I allowed it to be set up with DHCP, just to get things running. Then I tried to change this. But the Network tool in Administration is crippled and basically useless. After some effort and research I finally found a way - I created /etc/systemd/network/static.network and put the following into it. After a few reboots etc. this finally took effect. (It may have been possible to do this by editing the configuration for the NetworkManager daemon (afaik there’s no runnable interface any more) but if so I didn’t figure it out. I did not find any other solution online, but there may have been one.)
[Match]
Name=enp4s0
[Network]
DHCP=no
Address=192.168.2.11/24
Gateway=192.168.2.1
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somewhere along the way Ubuntu Software Center stopped working - clicking on the menu item has no effect. I couldn’t figure out what the underlying program name is to try to run it from the command line, and I’ve been using Synaptic mostly and apt-get sometimes anyhow, so this is still a pending item but no biggy.
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finally, I thought I might try Redmine. I was unable to get it working because it required jquery-rails, which required ruby-2.2.2, while this distribution only has ruby-2.1.x. I muddled about for a while trying to figure out how to do ruby upgrades but finally just tossed it.
So that’s my story. This has not been more problematic than installs of many other things, so this is just a collection of things I ran into for others’ amusement. 
