After Using Ubuntu Mate for a year...

[buster]

Installed Mate on my 46 inch screen tv computer about a year ago and thought, since no one has mentioned it, that you might like a review.

#1. Since I like OS's that set up easily, just work, and have low maintenance, this had to become a favourite. Put it in the same category as Mepis, Mandrake, PCLinuxOS, and Linux Lite, and as far away as you can get from Gentoo, Slackware, and Arch.

#2. For me it has been rock solid. Updates don't rattle it, heavy use almost never overloads my fairly old desktop 3 core machine.

#3. The menu is top left, so Mike will not complain that it looks like Win7  .

#4. Docky sets up nicely, the icons are pleasing to me, and the file folder has an 'extra pane' if you want it to move files.

#5. Firefox and Thunderbird are  pre-installed, so I only needed to install qBittorrent, Kpat, Tux games and maybe one or two others.

#6. It's a development by a couple of talented Brits, who seem to take the task of maintaining it seriously, and it has a fair following - #16 on DistroWatch. Pretty good forum.

#7. It seems fairly quick as I use it. Maybe it's been stripped right down.

#8. Seeing Windows shares set up by default. Since I'm not running a business, that seems good.

#9. I don't think about it much. It's just there and I use it. Hard to give an operating system much more praise than that.

#10. And finally, it has that indefinable element that gets to you, so that you smile and say, "I like this." And nobody can explain that.

[fox]

The head dev, Martin Wimpress, is very clever, and has continually innovated Ubuntu Mate to improve it with each release. He is now a Canonical employee. Ubuntu Mate got a very positive review in the Linux Action Show (last April. New features of Ubuntu Mate include options to change the look of the Desktop. You can even make it look like Unity now.

[buster]

"You can even make it look like Unity now."

I would put that right up there with making the desktop purple, orange or lime green. Good suggestion Mike.

[Jason]

Thanks for the review, Harry!

I've been using it for probably a year, too. I've told people about in the club in person but probably never posted about it. It's my favorite distribution. I was using Elementary before that. But I also use the Cupertino (i.e. Apple look) theme. But you can also make it look like Unity or Windows or the traditional MATE look.

It's fast because it uses MATE which I believe is a fork of Gnome 2. Snappy and fast desktop. I'm using it now on my Intel Core Quad 2.4 Ghz system with 8 GB of RAM. When I first boot up it's only using 1 GB of RAM. Curious how you managed to have a 3 core system, Harry. Is that a typo?

And the Boutique has a nice set of applications that cover the most common and cherished applications. You will still want to install the Software Manager or Synaptic though to get a wider range of applications, though.

I didn't know about the Extra Pane feature in Caja (the file manager). Thanks!

[buster]

The Phenom X3 8000, "the world's only triple-core x86 processor". They're supposed to be bargain chips for budget consumers, but they're a nicer bargain for AMD, actually, since it let them dump bug-plagued quad-core Phenoms by disabling a core. My son put me on to them. He said they were cheap and fast, bug free at 3 cores. No idea what they cost back then because mine cost zero dollars. And by time I got it, it had been replaced by newer chips on the market.

[buster]

One thing you could check on your Mate install Jason that I find kind of funny is that when I click my Update icon each day, I always get an update!!!

It might only be a meg or two, but they are fixing and upgrading software every day. Good for us I suppose, and a good feature, but I've never seen it before. I don't use Ubuntu  so I don't know if that is just passed on from Mother or is Mate's work.

[Jason]

I never noticed that but then I have security updates set to update automatically and other updates only notify me once a week. But I'll set it all to daily and no automatic updating and see if I get the same. My guess is that they're from Ubuntu upstream.