I had some time to kill over the Holiday weekend so I tried Ubuntu-MATE 16.10 and Linux Mint 18 Cinnamon on an old computer, AMD-64 quad core, 8GB ram, 1 TB hard drive, Nvidia C77 GeForce 8300 graphics.
Mint was impressive at first, but after installing Chromium, it had similar issues running Chromium and Firefox as I’d had on Mate 16.04 with the Nouveau drivers. Installing the proprietary 340 “recommended” driver seems to have broken the system.
Mate Alpha seems off to a great start! Using the default Nouveau driver I can run Firefox, Chromium, and Chrome simultaneously with no issues. I’ve never got this far before giving up on Nouveau! I haven’t yet done any challenging video playback, but this is real progress to me! I’d be thrilled to not need proprietary drivers, but even though I don’t do 3D, up to now Nouveau has always been seriously lacking. Flying around Google Maps “Satellite View 3D” and “Street View” worked very well!
My only real complaint so far, is that Software Boutique can’t seem to queue up installation requests as it does in 16.04. A request, get the su token at the start and hold it for the entire session (like Synaptic does) and stop the password nagging when installing packages would be most welcome! In 16.04 I can queue up installations requests but at some apparently random to me interval it stop and asks for my password again. Mint 18 seems to have got this right, but unfortunately has show-stopper issues for me at the moment. I see potential in Cinnamon, but Mate just works the way I want without a lot of fluff.
The only thing I preferred about Cinnamon is it only had a single “bar” at the bottom. this saves screen space, I suspect I can customize Mate to be similar and might if I was forced to use only 1920x1080 screen (like on my test system), but on my 1920x1200 screens the extra space on the bottom bar to switch desktops and raise/lower running applications is well worth the pixels.
Mate is really moving along!
I’ll have to see if Antiviral has the same issue it had in Mate 16.04 after I’ve tried some challenging video playback.
Kudos to the Ubuntu-Mate team!
My wife and I are very happy with Mate 16.04! And I am quite impressed with the out of the box 16.10-alpah experience.
I’m not sure about which packages implement what features, but so far I’ve not seemed to notice the lack of Gnome Main Menu in 16.10, so its obviously not what I thought it was.
