Learn Ubuntu MATE (For Beginners)

I have been using Ubuntu MATE for a while and recently I’ve had several people ask me how it works and explain the difference between it and Windows 10. So I got the idea to build a simple website for those curious seekers. The site allows them to look at one place to compare Ubuntu MATE to Windows 10. Then they can use their own judgement if Ubuntu MATE will work for them.

I am in the very early stages of the website, so I still have a lot of work to do. I have recently started embedding YouTube videos to help explain each topic that I cover. It’s not fancy. Before I decided to start using Ubuntu MATE, I spent hours looking at reviews online and too many hours to count at watching YouTube reviews. Hopefully, I provide the information that someone needs in making the choice to switch to Ubuntu MATE. Then use the site as a reference if they need any help.

My site is called, Learn Ubuntu Mate and it is at: http://learnubuntumate.weebly.com/

Thanks for taking the time to read my post.

Tommy Thompson

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Hallo Tommy Thompson

You may find these two sources of information useful for further developing your already useful website:

Further software alternatives

Tutorials about Caja

As Caja has so much to offer compared to the windoze file manager, and considering that many people would not even suspect that certain functionality might exist, I recommend newcomers taking a little time to familiarise themselves with its features.

Good luck with the further development of your website. :slight_smile:

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Thank you! I will definitely check them out.

Tommy Thompson

6 posts were split to a new topic: Tuxedo’s Mutant Ubuntu MATE

Your site and the other two mentioned are desperately needed. To escape the MS world everyone needs reassurance that it is not back to MS-DOS and voodoo dolls. Which is what probably 95% of them think. ''Tis hard to beat the millions of dollars MS spends promoting their stuff.

Thanks for tackling such a project, Fred

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Thank you! I started by created similar emails to those pages on my site
and sending them to help my uncle and sister. I replaced their Windows 10
with Ubuntu MATE because they kept getting infections on their systems.
Then I realized that other people might want to switch from Windows to
something different and they may need help understanding something new.
Like my family members.

I agree with you 100%, Microsoft spends so much money that everything thing
else other than Apple is left in the shadows.

After I get more material on the site, I will try to think of ways to get
exposure. I will try my best to spread the word on open source software and
Ubuntu MATE.

Thanks again for contacting me.

Have a great day!

Tommy Thompson

Hi!

May I ask what you used to create this PDF? I started on writing UM user-guide or more like
porting Ubuntu Manual to Ubuntu MATE a year ago but then kind of lost the interest and after a while decided to delete it from github along with my old github account because it wasn’t used much. That actually was a good thing sort of because I was using ubuntu-mate handle so that I could present the webpage and PDF on ubuntu-mate.github.io
Anyway that gave @lah7 the opportunity to register it and convince Wimpy to migrate to github.

If you wan’t to join the forces maybe we could convince Luke to bring the user-guide project to github. That is if @lah7 can create a repo called ubuntu-mate.github.io and give some of us users repository rights to it. The reason I don’t wan’t a longer name is because it would be a pain to type and not very SEO friendly.

I used Asciidoctor, if one would to choose markdown now for such project I would say that gitbook-cli is a best bet since it’s open source can provide search functionality in html form and generate nice PDFs.

I only have the intro but I think Ubuntu Manual is a good starting point

Here are the original links to the user guides I have on my webpage. I
didn’t want to hotlink or bandwidth leech from their site.
http://goinglinux.com/ is an excellent site for Linux help and resources.

Ubuntu MATE: User Guide
http://goinglinux.com/resources/Ubuntu%20MATE%20User%20Guide.pdf

Ubuntu MATE: Upgrading from Windows or OSX
http://www.goinglinux.com/resources/Ubuntu%20MATE:%20%20Upgrading%20from%20Windows%20or%20OSX.pdf

The material on my menus and submenus are from things I created. I am
currently working on explaining the Caja file manager. I can only work a
little bit at a time, so it’s a slow go.

Take care,

Tommy Thompson

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Tommy, thanks SO much for getting the ball rolling, very nice presentation!

As everyone would, I’d offer one request: “How to correctly deal with USB Flash drives in Mate”. Right click the desktop icon to Eject or Safely Remove? What if right click does not offer Safely Remove, what now? Unmount using the Disks tool? I’ve damaged a couple flash drives on a different distro using an older version of Mate, and the Mate Disks tool was part of the issue. That setup is long reformatted away, because my experience was that when ROOT (at a console) repartitioned and reformatted a device partition, their Mate desktop environment would not recognize the partition correctly until the Mate Disks tool itself reformatted it. That is unacceptable to me, because root administration should take precedence.

But yes, great work!

Hi mmmmna,

Thanks for the comments. I will eventually add mounting and unmounting
drives to Ubuntu MATE on my website. I haven’t worked on it in a while
because of some personal things, but I do plan to get back to updating it
in the near future. Thanks for taking the time to look over my site and
comment on it.

Have a great day!

Tommy

@Tommy_Thompson This is great for new people to Linux in general!
:slight_smile: Its still not the best but REALLY good!!

Can I use some of the info for my website?

Hi DiamondLinuxMan,

What is your URL? You may not won’t to copy a lot of content directly from
someone’s else webpage and insert in it yours because it will lower the
search engine ranking of your website and the website you copied the
content from. An old practice of getting high search engine rankings used
to be getting the same material out in multiple places on the Internet.
Search engines caught on to this practice and they now filter out redundant
or duplicate content. You can even lower the ranking of your own website by
repeating the same content throughout the site. You can educate yourself on
web rankings by reading the “Duplicate content” section at
https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66359?hl=en. Here’s an
important sentence from that site: “As a result, the ranking of the site
may suffer, or the site might be removed entirely from the Google index, in
which case it will no longer appear in search results.

If you are trying to help people learn Ubuntu MATE then you might want to
add links to the original content or create your own content. This will
prevent Google and other search engines from removing your site and
possible the site the original information came from. I personally don’t
mind since the point of the site is to educate beginners on using Ubuntu
MATE; however, if the content has a low search engine ranking or is no
longer found on a search engine, it defeats the purpose of creating the
site.

I created my site to help my oldest sister and uncle because they both
recently switched from Windows 10 to Ubuntu MATE. Someone from the Ubuntu
MATE Community found my website using a search engine and emailed me and
ask me to put the link on the Tips, Tricks and Tutorials/Tutorials & Guides
site.

Good luck with your website. I hope you are able to help people learn a new
operating system.

Tommy Thompson

I mean reword the info for my website (not yet made) and give credit.

Hi,

I stumbled upon your website "Learn ubuntu mate" some time ago. It is very well done and informative! Just wanted to say thanks for your efforts!

Keep up the good work!

Cheers

Thank you! I think Ubuntu MATE is a wonderful operating system.

Take care,

Tommy Thompson

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