Bug#737013: mate-desktop: Fails to start

Wed Jan 29 11:13:08 UTC 2014

MATE Desktop is not yet fully packaged in Debian. We're still working on 
it (you can check the status at 
http://wiki.mate-desktop.org/status:debian).

mate-desktop package is just a package referring to the mate-desktop 
library. Its description says "Library with common API for various MATE 
modules", indeed. When MATE will be ready, there will be other meta 
packages to install it.