It’s definitely a very well made desktop environment. It’s what I started with back in 06-08 when I started using Ubuntu. Ubuntu has a pretty well built mate flavor, as does Linux mint. The Ubuntu mate flavor is a great one to see what’s functionally possible with mate. There’s a bunch of preconfigured set ups matching various other operating systems and some unique configurations. On my main PC, I’m running garuda xfce, but with bspwm as the window manager. For my laptop, I’m running pretty much the same set up, but with Linux mint Debian edition in xfce/bspwm as well. Your set up is still rad though, I really dig it!