What are "Mate Desktop Environment" packages?

I'm using Kinetic.
I have seen mate-desktop-environment in the repository. It depends on mate-desktop-environment-core and has many Recommended packages - They are mostly installed by default but not all of them - and many more packages as suggests. But it's not installed by default when it says:

This package installs the standard set of applications that are part of the official MATE release.

I also see mate-desktop-environment-extras which isn't installed as well even though many of its depending packages are.

Can anyone tell me what they actually do if I install them - Are they useful for Ubuntu-MATE 22.10 - and why they are not installed by default or at least recommended somewhere in welcome screen to be installed?

The best way to find out exactly what a package does is

apt show package-name

You may need

sudo apt update

before, if you haven't done so recently.

That will list all the included applications and other information. Some names will be self-explanatory; others may take a quick search to find their purpose.

1 Like

Of course that I did. That's why I know what packages it depends on and so on!
And a better way of that -in my opinion - is using Aptitude package manager, at least for watching details about a package and the packages it depends on or recommend/suggest in TUI or Synaptic in GUI