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Ubuntu Mate
- m_b 6y agoReminds me of Ubuntu 8.04, the first version I tried back in 2008. I personally find that Mate’s UI didn’t aged well. I wonder why this is popping up on HN’s frontpage.
- ktpsns 6y agoMates UI is Gnome 2 by intention. It is a matter of taste.
- bzb6 6y agoIsn’t it a fork?
- pantalaimon 6y agoYes, it's based on the last release of Gnome 2.
- pizza234 6y agoMATE belongs to the class of traditional-metaphor/resource-light desktop environments. Looking good is a secondary target. The direct competitor is XFCE. There are a couple of advantages I personally find over XFCE: - XFCE has a very severe lack of resources; in worst case, this translates to bugs (even severe) not being fixed for a very long time - MATE has a very flexible interface (it's actually impressive how they have exactly the opposite philosophy as the GNOME guys) I've been a longtime XFCE user, but when a couple of bugs started affecting my workflow, I had to leave it. The worst case has a been a bug where around 25% of the times (if not more), moving files via file manager caused the file manager to crash. This has gone unfixed for a very long time (at least 6 months). Despite what some people believes, it's not possible to swap the default file manager. While it's technically feasible, DEs have their FM harcoded in some places (ie. Desktop), which causes subtle breakages if the default FM is swapped.
- pjmlp 6y agoAnd the beauty of FOSS, contributing bug fixes and all that jazz?
- rawoke083600 6y ago>MATE belongs to the class of traditional-metaphor/resource-light desktop environments. Looking good is a secondary target. Yup and the next step after that is "title wm" I've recently switched from XFCE to i3mw. So far it' been brilliant !
- cechmaster 6y ago> Looking good is a secondary target. What a terrible goal. Why not make it just as important as performance?
- ajford 6y agoHoly shit... do you have a link handy to that file manager bug? I run XFCE and have for a while, but I've been seeing that issue lately and thought it was my (older) ssd going out. Hadn't thought it could be related to the DE. Perhaps it's time to give MATE a try.
- pizza234 6y agoI don't have a reference unfortunately, but here's something similar (if not the same): https://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2356 https://bugzilla.xfce.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2356
- MeinBlutIstBlau 6y agoYeah Mate is really meh. If I ever introduce users to Linux, it's Mint almost 100% of the time. Cinnamon is fairly stable and feels very much like windows. So far things haven't been bad for me but the moment I try anything besides cinnamon, people figure out how to break it.
- dep_b 6y agoNice to see that the drink Mate is slowly entering the consciousness of the rest of the world through both the most famous football player of the world as well as the programming world. I take it whenever I have to work in a place with bad coffee.
- forinti 6y agoI'm not a fan, but it sure beats bad coffee when all you need is something warm. In order to reduce my coffee consumption, I've also tried drinking just warm water. It seems the Chinese recommend it.
- danpalmer 6y agoYeah in China cold water is considered bad for your health, although as far as I can tell this is more tradition than actual health advice, likely derived from the necessity of boiling water to make it safe to drink before safe running water. It's common to add some green tea leaves and continually top up using the same leaves throughout the day.
- globular-toast 6y agoDrinking warm water is very popular in India and considered to be more healthy than imbibing liquid at temperatures below body temperature.
- jbaber 6y ago[Pero]'s my favorite caffeine-free coffee replacement. [Pero]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caro_%28drink%29?wprov=sfla1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caro_%28drink%29?wprov=sfla1
- Phlogistique 6y agoPoe's law in action: I'm unsure whether you are mocking people who do not read the article, or if you actually failed to read the article and thought that Ubuntu Mate was some kind of Ubuntu-branded yerba mate.
- 6y ago
- ponderingfish 6y agoI've tried it and it reminded me of the old Debian using Gnome 2 which I absolutely enjoyed. I ended up using the "MacOS" theme in Mate which comes with useful key-bindings and shortcuts. Plus, it isn't much of a resource hog.
- forinti 6y agoUbuntu Mate is great for old laptops.
- newswasboring 6y agoAnyone tried this on a raspberry pi? I currently use it as a media center but have only raspbian installed.
- black_puppydog 6y agoYes, I've been running this on my P400 for about a week now. It's smooth, and the baseline memory pressure makes is quite usable for dog-fooding arm builds of my projects. Ubuntu mate is a bit faster-moving than the Gnome ("main") Ubuntu in terms of features and neat little fixes. Martin Wimpress (the main dev of Ubuntu Mate, at least he used to be, now he might be more busy with his other stuff at Canonical...?) has been really trying to push these board-specific images, and IMHO the quality is quite good.
- jug 6y agoI'm thinking of buying the Raspberry Pi 400 and I see Ubuntu MATE indeed has a 64-bit Raspberry Pi port. While the "400" apparently has some compatibility issues in some scenarios, it's essentially a higher clocked Pi 4. Assuming it's working, I wonder if it's performant as a Raspberry Pi OS alternative to the official distro? I think I prefer a cleaner MATE over the default stuff. Edit: Oh I see now I essentially posted in parallel with another question about the Pi running this. Well, there are images for it at least!
- black_puppydog 6y agoAs I said in the other P400 thread, yes, this is quite nice to use. Pay attention to which apps you use: electron/node based apps will quickly make this a drag. Use script/ad blockers (umatrix...) to save on web resources. Be weary of e.g. bash prompts that traverse the file system (to show git status or such) as these things will be slow on an sd card system.
- mcbits 6y agoI have a Pi 4 (8 GB) with Ubuntu MATE and the main flaw I've run into is that a lot of programs don't scale down to the little 1024x600 LCD I hoped to use with it. Of course, that will be a problem with any distro on such a small screen. On a regular monitor it's just a bit sluggish, but no worse and perhaps a little faster than the official OS. Plenty usable as a low-end desktop. I don't think it has even come close to exhausting 8 GB (looks like the 400 only has a 4 GB version?). I just wanted some head room there.
- bArray 6y agoI would suggest they remove the screenshot of the Avengers movie given the amount of DMCA going on for such things... (loosely suggesting some open source software could be used for viewing pirated material.) Big Buck Bunny by the Blender Foundation could be a good replacement [1]. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqz-KE-bpKQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aqz-KE-bpKQ
- capableweb 6y agoThe case of youtube-dl using snippets of copyrighted material for testing is very different from showing a media player viewing copyrighted material. The former is easy to argue is breaking copyright protections while the latter is not. We'll be in a very different world if VLC couldn't even show that it can play mainstream media in it (check out the screenshots over at https://www.videolan.org/vlc/index.html https://www.videolan.org/vlc/index.html)
- bArray 6y agoI see what you're saying, but isn't showing screenshots of obviously copyrighted material just another form of testing?
- capableweb 6y agoNo, testing (in terms of software testing) refers to the process of verifying something is working as expected. The test suite for youtube-dl is/was using snippets of DRM protected material to ensure that their anti-DRM techniques were working as expected. Showing a screenshot of copyrighted material is just that, showing a screenshot of copyrighted material. Nothing is downloaded, asserted or even evaluated. For all we know, they can have a license for that material (or live in Germany, where ripping your owned DVD disks is legal). Two vastly different things.
- garmaine 6y agoIt's not showing a DVD or BluRay player, or a web-based streaming browser plugin. It's showing a clearly named Matroska video file containing a copyrighted movie that is very unlikely to be legally available in Matroska format. Sorry there isn't a defense here that would stand up to review.
- Zhyl 6y agoTo anyone playing Steam games on Linux: Steam -> Settings -> Steam Play -> Click "Enable Steam Play for all Titles"
- flurdy 6y agoAnd install Lutris https://lutris.net/ https://lutris.net/
- mosselman 6y agoI haven't figured out how to use Lutris with Steam nor have I discovered what the advantage would be. Or do you mean installing Lutris regardles of steam?
- Zhyl 6y agoYou can launch Steam games with Lutris. It has API integration.
- b0afc375b5 6y agoThis is the first time I've heard of lutris. Quick google search suggests that it is similar to proton.
- Shared404 6y agoIt has functions that are similar to proton. It's more like an alternate game library/launcher. I mostly use it to manage emulators, while the rest of my games are through steam or apt.
- nextlevelwizard 6y agoAt least with some older release MATE team was forking some system libraries which caused it to be incompatible with actual releases. Which in turn meant that when a critical security flaw was found and patched the patch couldn't be taken into use in MATE systems since it would break all software delivered with the image. I suspect things have since been fixed, but just something to make sure before you start to use the distro.
- chpatrick 6y agoI used to use Mate but I think maintaining GNOME 2 is an uphill battle. Now I use gnome-flashback with xmonad and don't really have any problems. On NixOS it's very simple to configure.
- aitchnyu 6y agoAfter Moore's law and major DEs fixing performance issues, will a lightweight DE improve the experience for, say a 2015 i5?
- known 6y agoDo we have to install xcompmgr in Mate?
- O_H_E 6y agoI have always felt Ubuntu Mate to be especially lucrative to recommend to new users due to the existence of the great software boutique: https://ubuntu-mate.org/features/boutique/ https://ubuntu-mate.org/features/boutique/, welcome app introducing new users to Linux, Mate, and Foss, and the predefined layouts: https://ubuntu-mate.org/features/panel/ https://ubuntu-mate.org/features/panel/
- hobby-coder-guy 6y agoLucrative is the wrong word.
- scott31 6y agoGNOME 3 was a mistake, Unity was even more of a mistake.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- 1MachineElf 6y agoI had MATE running on both GuixSD and NixOS in 2019. For some reason, it wouldn't detect the F1 through F12 keys my QMK-based keyboard was sending. That's as far as I got before giving up, but it did look promising. As other commenters said, Ubuntu Mate looks like Ubuntu 8.04, of which I too had my first year-long experience using Linux as a daily driver.
- dang 6y ago"Show HN" is for sharing your personal work: https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html. Is that the case here? If so, please let me know at hn@ycombinator.com and I'll be happy to restore "Show HN" and delete this comment. I took it out for now because there are other Show HNs in your submission history which make it look like there might have been a misunderstanding of the category.
- ncmncm 6y agoAnything to like about Ubuntu Mate is better in Mint Mate. It's Ubuntu without the attempts at lock-in. But Debian Mint (Mate/Cinnamon/Gnome) is pretty OK too. Personally, I have never understood why anybody installs Ubuntu. Ubuntu was better for a couple of years, right at the start, and has just gotten worse since. The only thing it does better is that an installer that understands current hardware is easier to find. (Debian has it too, but tries to hide it, because "nonfree".) So, installing Debian Mint is the best of all worlds. Once you have installed Debian Mint, you have regular Debian.
- Darmody 6y agoNot my cup of tea but I've been using it on al old laptop that I use to run some local game servers and it does the job.