For composition I prefer to use compton, it is light and by default works out of the box without tearing and no fancy effects. Yeah, I like Compiz but indeed it is not the best choice and I saw some bugginess but nothing too drastic.
The Wifi issues are real, after first install and after resume, I blame network manager as I saw the same happening on Arch. I also saw the occasional brightness issues after resume but other than that everything else is mostly great.
I really cannot complain about Ubuntu Mate 16.04. I had more problems with the main Unity version.
I would go with some of wizd3m’s suggestions, especially determining the hardware specs and graphics card.