Ubuntu-Mate became an official "flavour" after 15.04, though it was made available for the LTS version which is soon to be replaced if I recall correctly.

I don't know why I don't like Mint, it's all Linux, but I suppose it's just the Green theme that puts me off. I absolutely love Mate in Ubuntu, but my previous favorite distro, PClinuxOS, which I used with the KDE desktop, also had weird Mate styling, and I just couldn't be bothered to *fix* it. The styling supplied by Ubuntu-Mate is right up my alley (I still tweak it, but only lightly) and Martin Wimpress has gone out of his way to make this tinkering easy, not to mention all his hard work on the software manager and was the first official flavour to outright dump the original Ubuntu software app, which was quite dreadful.

Speaking of default styling, I could never use Ubuntu in it's earlier form with it's orangy brown theme.... It just drove me up the wall for some reason and so I never bothered with it until Mate came along. I booted up the liveCD and fell in love with it.


Regards

Christian