Continuing the discussion from Can Manjaro-Mate desktop manager be changed from Caja to Dolphin?:
Hey @robbie-hatley ,
Well, that would explain why Dolphin has no “–force-desktop” option as Caja does.
And, essentially, that means that the answer to my question is “You can’t do that, so stop trying.”. Sigh. :-/ Well, it is what it is.
Ok, I installed Plasma, and wow, is it a different environment from Mate! On the plus side, it’s much more configurable. But on the minus side, it’s much more configurable. (Cuts both ways: more things can be tweaked, but the the mountain of available settings is slower to wade through.)
I find that when I log-in, I’m now given two options: Mate or Plasma. Both work. I’m finding I like plasma somewhat better than Mate anyway (in part because I prefer Dolphin’s ability to turn-off the “natural” (ie, unnatural) sort in favor of alphabetic sort), so that may be my ultimate solution. There’s a few bugs doubtless from left-over bits of Mate showing up in Plasma, such as dual Blue-Tooth icons in my taskbar, and an error message pops up in one of the settings, but I can always track those down later, they’re not show-stoppers.
I must say, that between the latest Gnome and Plasma, I much prefer Plasma. I tried installing Gnome on a spare notebook a few weeks ago, and I found its interface infuriating. Whereas, Plasma, I like. But I digress.
Anyway, thanks for the technical details on Caja, Dolphin, Plasma, and desktops. They’ve convinced me that I should just use Plasma as my main DE instead of trying to make Mate something it isn’t.
Interesting experience 
. I just read this and had a question: Were you using Ayatana Indicators in MATE and have you used Ubuntu MATE once? Just out of curiosity.