The following is a list of known issues with MATE on Slackware: Mon Jun 10 03:09:28 UTC 2013 If you are encountering problems with Caja (MATE's file manager) opening directories when clicking on files in certain programs like Dropbox, Skype, and others, the problem is that xdg-open (part of Slackware's xdg-utils package) does not recognize the MATE desktop and therefore defaults to opening the directories in Firefox. Fixes for this have been committed to xdg-utils upstream development in Git but for now, we must apply a patch to xdg-open and add some xdg-mime default handlers. First, as a root user, back up /usr/bin/xdg-open and then apply the xdg-open.patch from msb/testing/xdg-utils: patch -p0 /usr/bin/xdg-open < /location/of/xdg-open.patch Then, as your regular user, first back up the following file: $HOME/.local/share/applications/defaults.list and then enter the next two commands in a terminal to set the default handler: xdg-mime default caja-folder-handler.desktop inode/directory xdg-mime default caja-folder-handler.desktop application/x-directory You should be all set. Thanks to Totoro-kun and T3slider for reporting and discussing this in the LQ forums and also thanks to Giorgos Keramidas for creating the initial patch. Here is a link to the LQ thread which also has a link to Giorgos's blog with the patch: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/showthread.php?p=4968614 Wed Mar 27 04:23:24 UTC 2013 If you have dual monitor with NVidia card and set it up to use both monitors as separate, you might encounter some freeze lockup. A temporary workaround is to change it into TwinView in your xorg.conf Sun Mar 24 02:47:56 UTC 2013 If you run into strange panel issues, or missing icons, or theme problems, please consider backing up or clearing out some of the hidden directories in your $HOME, like $HOME/.config and $HOME/.cache and $HOME/.local. If you switch back and forth between different desktop environments, sometimes those settings can get polluted. Fri Mar 22 16:44:59 UTC 2013 Help menus and help buttons do not work -- this is a known issue per a MATE upstream developer and scheduled to be fixed at some point but not in the next release (1.6). Fri Mar 22 16:43:36 UTC 2013 Working to determine whether mate-polkit is necessary. According to upstream, it is, although it results in duplicative polkit actions when a USB stick is inserted, for example. Disabling polkit-gnome in the "Startup Applications" is a workaround until more testing is done.