Okay, that works. But it works at the cost of caja not running at all. Personally, I don’t mind that, but it might be a problem for other folk.
I haven’t actually wasted a lot of time on this. MATE is for playing around. I use KDE most of the time.
Fix is easy but not in context of initial boot up and a new user, or even an old! Perhaps after following tutorial or install instructions to the letter. Is too much to unexpected expect effort from user at that stage. Thing should at least boot!
Saying “easily fixed” here are big words I think. Is blocking usage of entire DE until fixed so lets hope “In the meantime…” means what it says. Working on it. Should be high priority.
Just had a thought. May be MATE devs. never really targeted against putting MATE on top of other DE? Could be reason.
And doing that makes it an openSUSE issue? Dont know… may be good issue got reported.
I’ll note that I have not been criticizing opensuse for this. I have reported as a bug, but that’s a matter of wanting opensuse to be better.
In a way, though, it is an opensuse issue. Namely, you cannot install MATE from the DVD, so most people will install MATE as an additional desktop rather than as the only one.
And a note to any curious readers. If you want MATE as the only desktop, then use the DVD installer and install only “minimal X”. That gets you “Icewm”. Then install MATE patterns once you are online. Alternatively (and I have not tested this), use the NETWORK installer, or use the DVD and add online repos for the install. Then install minimal X, but get into the software selection part of install and add the MATE patterns.
Well what is a bug tracker for if not to report bugs? Is good you do this as most are too lazy, my self included. If you criticize just to criticize you probably get kicked out, not a worry 
Anyway, this might be interesting if some need motivation for another install.
Interview with Martin Wimpress, dev. from MATE http://linuxluddites.com/shows/episode-26/
Another follow up interview with him plus review of Ubuntu MATE http://linuxluddites.com/shows/episode-29/
Ubuntu MATE is relevant as that is big for MATE project. What happens there will have impact on everything MATE I think.
He also suggest those podcast people REPORT bugs and not just talk about them!
Is interesting to hear story and motivation.
Review focus a bit too much on “bugs”, can take a look here https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu-mate Many parts have been updated already so not that bad. I do not get most Linux reviews, seems they talk for minutes about defaults settings which can be toggled but nm. Try KDE and learn to set things up is what I think. Might be good to keep eye on Ubuntu bug tracker though.
Ubuntu MATE was bad for me due to other reasons, this the worst http://askubuntu.com/questions/517844/why-is-my-cpu-frequency-stuck/524392#524392 No cpufreqd service on openSUSE MATE Cpu scales properly. Also when I imported a bunch of Virtualbox appliances Ubuntu pretty much froze. Very unresponsive. Doing exactly the same on openSUSE went smoothly. Something very off with i/o stuff - their kernel or some Ubuntu service I suppose. Was not bothered enough to investigate.
Thanks for the links. I’m listening right now. However, that podcast is awefully long, so I’m not sure I’ll listen to the whole thing.
I do like that name “linux luddites”. I have sometimes called myself a “hi-tech luddite”, mostly because so much is over-hyped.
I wrote when MATE guy show up but then noticed it says on their page so removed. Should not because you have to scroll down so not obvious unless you know.
First link can be skipped to 1:07
Second to 1:12
Pretty good podcast about everything Linux and related topics. I have been looking around, this by far the best. Helps if being a bit critical minded I think. They do not jump up and down just because X release what ever.
They are in to minimal stuff for real, expect mostly shaking heads with regards to KDE, Gnome 3 not to mention Unity. Nothing must change
A bit late with the responce but I think I found the reason why caja craches and mate fails to start with infinite caja windows.
According to this post
https://github.com/mate-desktop/mate-desktop/issues/112
Caja crashes because of a faulty handling of wallpaper pathnames that are encoded in a non-UTF-8 locale.
In openSUSE’s case it’s not a missing wallpaper but a missing Adwaita window border.
The reason this doesn’t happen on a minimal install is that it doesn’t have adwaita
A fix would be a new adwaita package that includes all the adwaita decorations.