I run into too many problems to recommend it to friends, and that sucks. It comes to basic things like:
- resume/suspend issues
- working with external/mass storage
- multi-user problems, popups appear under the wrong user
- screen/color vagueness, windows is much sharper
- grub menu popping up on dirty shutdown
- no auto-recovery for 'regular' people
- setting screen brightness
I am seriously considering reverting to 18.04 if things become worse.
That being said, I really like Mate and what it ultimately could be if these problems get resolved. But recommending it to my friends is still too early.