This is just a heads up to you guys. Something minor, but annoying cropped up in yesterday's updates, notably with xserver and Mate panel software. I didn't check the bugs list, which may or may not have helped, but here we are. In any case, upon logging in, I was given an error that the clock had quit unexpectedly and I was given the options to delete, reload, or not reload, along with the same error for the workspace switcher, windows list, show desktop, and notification area. They all disappeared except, strangely enough, the show desktop button. The Mate Classic Menu was unaffected. First instinct was to just try to re-add them on the panel. That did not work; same popup errors. Some applets could be added, strangely enough (Window Selector [not Switcher], Shutdown, Mounter, etc). The ones in question could not be added. I thought maybe we just had an incomplete update and left it at that for the day.
Today, I found no updates. I wondered if deleting all the applets that are failing to load, then logging out or rebooting, and coming back in and adding them would work. No success. I checked the xsession-errors and found:
Settings schema 'ca.desrt.dconf-editor.Settings' is not installed
Rather than trying to revert the updates, I decided to first check the install of the dconf-editor package. It wasn't there. I installed it and was able to repopulate all the applets without any issue. I checked /var/log/dpkg.log to see if dconf-editor was previously installed and somehow got uninstalled, but had no record of it whatsoever until I installed it myself.
So, the long and short of it is, in my experience, if you have Mate applets issues today, install dconf-editor and try again.