I have been using Ubuntu MATE as my “daily driver” for several months, and I think it’s brilliant. MATE has easily become my favorite desktop environment. I have just a couple small feature requests. I like putting all my icons and controls in a vertical panel, but as far as I can tell, it’s not possible to make the clock and notification area widgets look very good in vertical panels. Xfce does this quite nicely, and I hope at some point MATE could do the same. Thanks.
I agree Xfce has been vertical panel support, such as the deskbar mode. That being said, I use (only) a vertical, left-side panel with MATE, and it works OK.
The clock will rotate to horizontal if the panel is wide enough (this varies with the GTK+ theme). There are tricks like using a custom clock format with a newline character if you want to have the date on it’s own line.
As for the notification area, my biggest gripe is that you can’t manually re-order the indicators. You can change some of theme by editing some config files in /usr/share/unity/indicators
, but the network applet doesn’t have a config file to edit…