I’m just wondering, Ubuntu Mate, if I am understanding this right, is based on Ubuntu which is available from Ubuntu.com
If that is the case, why is it that we can use Ubuntu Mate on the Raspberry Pi, but we can’t use Ubuntu from Ubuntu.com on the Raspberry Pi?
Thank you
While the Ubuntu base is managed by Canonical, the variants like Ubuntu MATE, which use different desktop environments than Ubuntu, are managed by several teams of independant developers.
So, first reason why Ubuntu MATE is available for the Pi and not Ubuntu would be that the UM devs decided they would take time to make a Pi variant and not the Ubuntu devs. You have to know that your desktop PC and your Raspberry Pi don’t use the same kind of CPU, softwares have to be written in a different way for each, so it takes time to manage both. The different versions are not done from scracth, the process is automated to create them from a common source, but it can happen that specific issues have to be addressed, thus the time and resources needed to manage software for the Pi.
A second reason would be that all DE don’t use the same amount of resources. While MATE is kind of light on this side, Unity/GNOME (used by Ubuntu) needs more RAM, a faster CPU and a GPU that can handle specific effects. It’s quite probable that Ubuntu would be pretty much unusable on a Pi, if it can work at all (I think the graphic driver is still very limited). And thus, the Ubuntu developers don’t want to waste time working on something that is completely unusable.
Welcome to the forum @timc00k.
There are a few other operating systems for the raspberry pi that can be downloaded from the following link.
https://ubuntu-pi-flavour-maker.org/download/
Installation instructions can be found on the same page.