Whoda thunk I would be using Ubuntu MATE after staying with Ubuntu since 10.04? We rarely change just for the sake of it, and i switched due to an issue (s) with gnome-shell. You see, the first thing is having to do an alt+F2+r every two or three days to restart the shell as it was consuming over a GB of RAM. Granted I had a lot of extensions running, but it happened when I disabled all the extensions - still the RAM usage goes higher and higher. Secondly and most importantly, 3 days time, when using gnome-screensaver and lock when screen turns off resulted in having to reboot or use ctrl+F3 tty and killing gnome-shell. Got fed up and here I am!
A nice surprise! Reminds me of Ubuntu before unity. Love it. Hopefully it will work for me. So far, I'm impressed!