I’ve been playing around in a VM with Mint MATE, and generally like it except for a few things like the different control panel and the way it locks me out of system files without an easy way to undo it. I also don’t like the way certain things on the Gnome 2ish panel I installed (with Mate-Tweak) are locked in place and I’m unable to move them (the rightmost panel with sound and everything is locked in place, and making custom menu items doesn’t really work). I also really don’t like the “modern” way the settings work, with no “Okay”/confirm button.
I like the idea of Mint of having farther apart updates with them not changing too much on the UI side. But how does that compare to Ubuntu MATE? Is one more stable than the other? Will Ubuntu MATE allow me more control (or do they both and I just need to figure out how to do it)? Which would you recommend? Probably Ubuntu MATE for obvious reasons, but why? Thanks.
Long time Mint user here. Had to move to Ubuntu Mate recently due to having bought a bleeding edge motherboard and not being able to get Mint running on it. Ubuntu Mate seems a bit less well-integrated with the underlying OS than Mint Mate, but the distro is newer, I have no doubt they’ll get it polished in time. And Ubuntu Mate includes a very recent 4.2 kernel which supports my hardware out of the box.
As for your panel question, if you want to move something on a panel, you right-click it, then uncheck ‘Locked to panel?’. Then you can right-click again and move it. You may have to unlock other items to get past them when moving an item. Also, the panel applet you mention is called the notification area, with that you have to right-click on the “divider” (along it’s left side) to do these things. Right-clicking on any of the icons in notification area brings up menus for that icon only, instead of a menu for the panel applet.
Mint is now based on Long term support versions of Ubuntu, so by design it should be more stable
Having more time between the releases also means that Mint is more polished
Unfortunately, the downside is that the kernel is somewhat old and new hardware might not be well supported
Personally I like it’s update manager, is definitely well tought
What I don’t like about it is that it doesn’t have any dark theme like Ubuntu Mate and I can’t use it at night because my eyes hurt
I started using MATE when it was introduced by Mint. Personally, I found Mint to be slightly annoying 
to use (especially when I tried to install previous purchases from the Ubuntu Software Center). So, I installed Xubuntu and installed MATE from a PPA, and was reasonably 
happy. When Ubuntu MATE 
was released, I went into my happy dance 
.Not one trace of Unity! 
I’ve used Linux Mint Mate, quite liked, has a system update notification well correct.
But I prefer to use the Ubuntu Mate who is also a very efficient and modern system.
Has all the applications that I need.
You can say that again. The Mint “fear of kernels” is a major problem when changes in 4.2 have my new Skylake-based machine fully supported yet, when going back to 3.x, the best resolution I can get is a sluggish 800x600 …
That said, Mint has really been helping to drive forward MATE (as has the illustrious leader of this distribution 
) and MATE 1.12 has substantial improvements.