>> Later on, we may still want to have a respin installer and/or liveCD
>> with Mate default and anyway Mate is simple to apt-get install.
>>
With XFCE 4.12, just released any interest I had in Mate is now
diminished considerably. I've nothing against Mate personally, but
objectively speaking, XFCE provides an equivalent or better featureset
with a lot less clutter. The XFCE codebase seems better maintained than
a rework of Gnome 2, IMHO.

My experience with Mate has been less than satisfactory lately. 
Differing distributions like Debian sid and OpenSUSE seem to have issues 
with mate-session causing UI crashes.    I'd think it will take some 
serious work before a Debian Mate respin, or that Mate itself can be 
taken as seriously as XFCE at present.

>> Many VUAs love Xfce4 and its team is really a good example of talented
>> open source developers with good concerns about usability, compatibility
>> and resource consumption.
The reason we like it? Gradual improvement over radical change.

>>
>> we may want to backport a newer package
>> ourselves with a more actual 4.12 (volunteers welcome).
>
What do you need specifically? I'd be willing to offer some time as
long as it is a discrete request, with a beginning and end. I've
already compiled 4.12 once.


t.j.