Today I installed Mate on this desktop, which I prefer over Unity as the computer is too slow for the 3D stuff. I've did a dist-upgrade, installed Mate, rebooted, selected the Mate desktop and logged in.
Now there is no menu bar. As I run Guake I can start a terminal with F12, then start firefox from the commandline. Firefox doesn't have a menu as well. Running the following command recovered that:
mate-panel --reset
Still no global menu. I see many questions about this for Unity, but not for Mate.
How can I get the global menu back for the Mate desktop?