My father used to be a big Ubuntu fan, before Unity came along, which he instantly hated (describing it with words like 'childish' and 'tinker-toy'). I tried hi

My father used to be a big Ubuntu fan, before Unity came along, which he instantly hated (describing it with words like 'childish' and 'tinker-toy'). I tried him on various alternatives, such as Mint or KDE, all of which were pretty unsatisfactory for various reasons. But then, just recently, I gave Ubuntu another try, and discovered that MATE is an out-of-the-box installation option --- and it's lost all the Unity nonsense and now provides a clean, stripped down, unfussy desktop environment where everything works and nothing gets in your way. Both he and I like it a great deal, and because it's an official Ubuntu release it's way more stable than Mint is.