Are there any essential differences between these two distributions? Thanks.
You mean, besides the obvious? (Ubuntu MATE is an official Ubuntu Flavor whereas the other thing is a non-official remix by a shady Russian company)
Edit: OK as @anon42388993 pointed below, I was a little quick on the trigger.
I guess having a fully Russian website with broken bits of HTML everywhere is not enough to consider an entity as shady anymore. :/
Edit2: And the website has an English version. I guess I was considered Russian earlier for some reason.
Is it really shady?
an official partner of Canonical
What’s the deal here? Why doesn’t someone give me an intelligent answer to my question?
There’s a number of stuff that were developed specifically for Ubuntu MATE, such as the projects listed on this page: https://bitbucket.org/ubuntu-mate/
Besides that, I don’t know the difference, maybe the guys from UALinux can give you more info.