Checked in Ubuntu Mate 14.10, 15.04.
Ubuntu Mate requires some minor tweaks after installation, and this is a list of those I had to do. This may also apply to other Ubuntu variants (and older variants, as well).
dnsmasq is enabled by default which is not desirable if you're using VPN. To fix, comment out the line dns=dnsmasq in the file /etc/NetworkManager/NetworkManager.conf.
If your UID is greater than 1000, you may have issues with changing your local password. Change the 1000 in /etc/pam.d/common-password to something greater:
password [success=2 default=ignore] pam_krb5.so minimum_uid=1000
Here is how to enable additional screensavers in mate-screensaver (taken from greyblake.com). It consists of fixing one line in each file in the directory /usr/share/applications/screensavers, so that they read: OnlyShowIn=GNOME;MATE; rather than OnlyShowIn=GNOME; (I hear that removing the line altogether will also work).
sudo apt-get install xscreensaver-data-extra xscreensaver-gl-extra cd /usr/share/applications/screensavers find . -name '*.desktop' | xargs sudo sed -i 's/^OnlyShowIn=GNOME;$/OnlyShowIn=GNOME;MATE;/'
If you would like to change some of the default behaviors, you need to use the xscreensaver-demo command, but it is part of the xscreensaver package which means that you're installing 2 packages doing the same job, and its inherent conflicts. If you install it, remember never to start the xscreensaver daemon.
When dual booting Linux and Windows, I usually mount the Windows partition in Linux (to exchange data files between the two systems). If you do this, you need to disable the Windows Fast Startup/Boot option, because it puts your computer in sleep mode, and not everything will be saved in its proper place on the disk. Linux will notice this, and refuse to mount the disk at boot time. See these links for instructions to do so, and a more complete explanation.
Windows assumes that the computer clock is set to local time while Linux assumes it is set to UTC. So when switching between the two systems one of the times could be off depending in which timezone you reside. Which one is better to change depends on your comfort level with each OS. I chose to fix Windows, and I modified the registry in Windows. See this article. Do this at your own risk.
When cloning a disk or a partition with the dd command, the UUID is also copied verbatim. So both disks/partitions cannot be mounted at the same time since the UUID must be unique for each, and you cannot change it with tune2fs as you can for the ext4 partitions. See this post #10 in this thread on how to do this for NTFS. You can then use this randomly generated UUID in your /etc/fstab file. Do this at your own risk.