Just commenting here that the Mate Desktop install on RL10.1 is working as expected. This is running in a Vbox vm on F43. Until this setup survives a point update I will not consider using RL10 on real hardware. I do intend to build BackupPC as a project.
I identified the network issue to be the fact I did not set a dns server in the config. It was not apparent for local ssh connections in the bridged device. I had switched back to a nat device which worked just fine.