I didn’t think it was very buggy but there were too much in it for me to consider it as a daily that is for sure.
My name is Josh from Texas. I first stumbled onto Ubuntu Mate when wimpy talked about it on the Linux Action Show. I am an arch user who found a home for Ubuntu Mate on my laptop. I dual boot with arch but find myself using Ubuntu Mate more and more as the days go by.
I guess you could say “I’m loving it!”
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Hi! I’m Muntasim Ul Haque from Bangladesh. I am an Electrical and Electronic engineer, free software enthusiast and GNU/Linux lover. I maintain a personal tech blog.
I started my journey in GNU/Linux world with Ubuntu 9.10. I love software and the way they work (I’m not a programmer/coder though). One day I was searching for different software to test on my WIndows PC and serendipitously found Ubuntu’s CD. I thought, well that’s something new! I brought that home and ran in Live mode. That was it. I couldn’t fathom how the hack that worked, and left it, for it didn’t interest me much back then.
Years passed. I downloaded Ubuntu 11.10 in the first year of my grad school and did my homework. I still do. I love reading about and testing different free and open source software. I follow couple of blogs/sites through RSS. I like the free software philosophy. I’m an avid distro hopper. To this day, I’ve tried mostly Debian, Ubuntu and their derivatives. I tried almost all the desktop environemtns and some of the tiling and stacking window managers.
That’s a whole lot about me. I don’t know for how long I would stick with Ubuntu MATE but I must say, I like it. I love Ubuntu MATE for it’s comparatively lightweightness and traditional desktop metaphor with three menus, that make sense. I like the dedication of Wimpy to this project. I think it’s one of the selling points for UM. UM has some minor bugs which needs to be checked. And when they do, I believe, it would make hell of a distro! And did I forget to mention that it’s awesome? 
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Hello everyone! My name’s Rob. I’m from northern New Jersey. My dad started me on computers at a pretty young age (I remember how to start a program on my TRS-80 by typing “r-u-n and Enter” before I knew how to read the word “run”) and I’ve been a tinkerer with them since. I was first introduced to Linux sometime around 2001-2002 with Mandrakesoft but that didn’t last very long. A few years later a friend introduced me to Ubuntu. I remembered the name “Linux” and thought I’d give it another go. I bounced back and forth between Windows 7 and Ubuntu/Linux Mint MATE for a while and about two years ago went full-time Linux on my personal machines. I was hesistant to give Ubuntu MATE a shot because I was in love with XFCE (on Xubuntu) but I wanted to check it out. I fired it up once and haven’t looked back since!
I’ve got two young boys I’m anxious to raise up in the FLOSS world and make advocates out of and a wife who simply won’t have any of my Linux craziness on her computer (I’m trying, honestly).
At this point I dualboot between uM and Debian on my main machine. I use the Debian install for podcast and music recording.
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Hiya! I just got around to checking out this community, so it’s a pleasant surprise to see that this topic was started by you. (I know Matt IRL).
So to intro to others: I’m Isaac Eiland-Hall, in Panama City.
I grew up as a DOS/Windows geek, from DOS 2.2 in 1987 though Windows 7. I’ve always been interested in Linux, and indeed have had a Linux server (running cPanel) since 2004, so I’ve slowly gotten to play around a little bit, although not a whole lot.
I’m stuck on an old 2007 crappy refurb PC, and while performance has never been great, it has deteriorated over the years. Between that, my interest in Linux, Linux getting better and better, and getting to the point where nearly everything I do is in the browser, so I was able to make the leap. Ubuntu seemed like a good choice, but Unity is all but unusable on this machine. So after some research and advice, I tried xubuntu, i.e. ubuntu+xfce. I love it.
But after Matt enthused about Ubuntu MATE, and I read some reviews that said it was slightly more lightweight that xfce, I’ve decided to give it a go.
I like it, although I haven’t noticed a huge number of differences between xfce so far. But most of what I notice, I do like. 
Oh, and I love that this supposed Markdown. I am a huge fan of Markdown.
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Awesome Isaac… I’m glad you decided to give it a shot 
What I personally like about MATE over Xfce is that the MATE team are making progress toward GTK3, and Xfce not so much that I’m aware of. MATE is also more of a complete environment vs Xfce. I like them both, but those are two of the things that draw me more toward MATE.
I like Ubuntu MATE because the Ubuntu base is outstanding in it’s own right. My first experience with MATE was actually on Arch and I never had an issue with it, but Arch just requires too much attention and setup, IMO. It’s a great distro, but if you don’t pay attention to the forums, a careless upgrade can cause issues. This isn’t typically a problem on an Ubuntu LTS release
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Hey guys!, just decided to come by say hello, share my story and why not. Glad to see this topic around!.
My name is Derek Demuro, from Montevideo, Uruguay, 25 years old, I own an IT Business… and hell, computers are you could say my life?.
Back to myself, i’m engaged (recently) at the Grand Canyon Skywalk, haha sorry im quite happy about that, but anyways. My first contact with a computer was a Macintosh, then an IBM Aptiva using Windows.
After that my first contact with Linux was with Suse 7.? I don’t remember exactly, then RedHat and later on Ubuntu.
I’ve used Ubuntu the longest, until Unity came by… turned my experience to hell to be honest, and left to OpenSUSE. OpenSUSE was nice, with KDE and the best integration I’ve seen, but I don’t enjoy a DE hogging my computer for no reason.
For work, I was CEO of my own company, now I left that position after 4 years to turn into CTO… im enjoying life again, at the same time I attend to university, computer science, my native languages are Spanish and English.
A bit more detail of work stuff, at first we used Cpanel to host clients, then we needed something more manageable, something we could plug into better, so we started using Virtualmin and since then, our company had a huge improvement.
Also we’re building our own interpretation of a cluster by developing a network replication, DNS, and network automated solution. Pretty much trying to figure out cheaper ways to build “the cloud” while saving costs.
As Ubuntu didn’t offer us enough stability our distro of choice after leaving CPanel with CentOS is Debian. So we manage 18 nodes, running Debian, we’ve built our own custom UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) and environmental control… thank god that’s as crazy as we get.
We have part of the infrastructure in the US (New Jersey) and the rest here in Uruguay. So if I can help with anything, or you need hosting, mirrors, build servers etc, just let me know and i’ll do my best to help.
I’m also a crazy programmer, C/C++, Java, Python, PHP, Bash, meh just give me a keyboard and i’ll do my best to help.
Anyways, I arrived to Ubuntu MATE because the team brought the desktop I used to love, Ubuntu + Mate as it was back in 10.04. I guess the reason behind my love towards Gnome 2.x is the fact that it’s functional, doesn’t hog resources and overall I feel has a clean UI. And as I write my post I stamp my commitment to the community.
I was happy to read more of your stories, so at any time! just drop me a message and i’ll reply asap!.
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My middle name is Paolo!. Glad to see a fellow Italian around, my family is from Potenza, don’t need to apologize for english i’m quite sure we all have our things!. If I had to write in Italian I’d be apologizing.
Well about time to do this… My name is Tim Apple, I live in Dallas Texas. I run around on steam, twitter, and IRC as parzzix.
I’ve been a linux enthusiast on and off since the late 90’s. Back then Slackware was my goto distro. I also bought the SUSE 7 disc set that was sold in Barnes and Noble all the time back then. I actually got my Community College sys admin to switch to SUSE for a cups server back then. He had a hell of a time getting printing to work in a Novell/Windows ecosystem. Even back then cups saved the day.
I studied IT for a little bit but my career was in the US Army. I spent 10 years there until I took a bullet in the back in 2004. Since then I’ve been an electrician, custom AV installer, climbed communication towers, and now I am project manager for a small IT company.
Ubuntu-Mate is my daily driver now, I fell in love at first install. I am working on getting some linux certs so I can hopefully move into a entry level linux admin role someday. I really would like to make open source work a career somehow.
@Wimpy I am here to stay, so feel free to throw any work/duties my way. I would be happy to help in any manner I am capable. And I learn pretty quick.
Done boring everyone.
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I forgot to introduce myself although I have been posting for ages …
I am Alastair Scott. I live in London, work for a big IT company as a test manager - hence the bugs and lists of observations 
- and have been using Linux for 10 years on and off and 4 years exclusively. I have oscillated between Ubuntu and Manjaro recently, but have settled on Ubuntu because Manjaro is too risky despite its attempts to smooth out the rolling release model (by combining releases and testing them before releasing “bundles” every two weeks) - in the past year a couple of those “bundles” have completely broken my system.
Why MATE? In another job I worked with one of the principal user interface designers of Gnome 2 and I know that his work was sound. It looks as though the excursions into user interfaces which were touch, keyboard and mouse-friendly (Gnome 3, Windows 8) were a wrong turning. I tried out the Windows 10 Technical Preview but, although a big improvement on Windows 8.1, it’s still a dog’s dinner of “traditional” and “Modern UI” components …
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My name is Robert (Bob) Wright, and though I am mainly from Texas and New Mexico, I now am retired and living on the Central Coast of California. I am an old man with a love for Linux. I got my first computer in the mid 1980s, and the adventure began. I also started off with dos and have worked on and used every OS Microsoft has made. They give techs a lot of job security. A friend got me interested in Linux in the 1990s, and after many years of using it, I have kicked Windows to the curb. I must admit that Arch with i3 or Gnome 3 is my main distro, but I am dual booting Ubuntu-Mate on main computer. I am a Jupiter Broadcasting fan and I quickly became impressed with Martin’s knowledge. When he came out with a distro, I knew it would be good, and it is great. This is a wonderful community. Thanks Wimpy for all your fine effort.
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My name is Steve, I am a northern Englishman. I am a teacher in the secondary sector. I used Linux on and off between 2007 and 2010. Since 2010, I have used Linux exclusively. Keeping only a VM of XP for the very occasional need to use MS Access for school work.
I use Linux for the following reasons:
- I don’t like the suffocating embrace of multinational global companies like Microsoft.
- I have an instinctive preference for DIY, bottom-up technologies. That is to say, technologies made by the people and for the people on an open source basis.
- This is really just a formalised restatement of (2). That is to say, I am a socialist.
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My name is Rodrigo . I like Ubuntu MATE , but I’m here for the girls . Of course .
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Hahahahaha…wish I’d thought of that one R…
Good one mate
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Hi,
I’m Nicolas from south west France.
I’m an opensource user since 2004, tried Mandrake in 2005 (had hard time to have a working X).
Was about to give up when a friend gives me an Ubuntu 05.04 in the late 2005. It was a revelation. Almost everything worked out the box (X, wireless drivers), a few commands and I had sound.
Used Linux Mint and then Crunchbang. I falled in love with the KISS philosophy.
I bought my actual laptop in 2013, and linux systems didn’t get well with the UEFI back then. The fake RAID also gaves me problems too. So I was cornered on win8 for almost 2 years unti i decided to try again.
Ubuntu worked out of the box, again. Get on it 2 weeks, get annoyed by unity then switch to linux mint 17. Was good.
Then I met @Wimpy on G+. Talked about Ubuntu Mate (he accosted me with stabilty) and I get enthousiamed by the project (great idea and potential, few people).
I’m curently a topographer and i will started a formation in september to learn Geographic Information System. Ubuntu and this PPA provide updated GIS Opensource software, so i can use it to start learning on my own. And it is easier to ask an installation to sysadmin than archlinux for example. So it just lacked a DE who pleased my taste. Here we are ^^
I have a several computers:
- Asus UX32VDA laptop (UEFI and fake RAID son of a b****)
- Odroid C1 (my blue eyed boy of the moment)
- my ■■■■■■■■ raspberry pi B+ (i will find a way to have it fully useful)
- some old dektop i boot once i a year
I’m a distro s*** too, i like to try new things. Get hooked by archlinux (well documented in french and KISS philosophy)
Didn’t try GIS software on it yet.
In brief, I’m a long time debian-based user, can’t code yet (maybe python) but I like sharing and participate.
Happy to meet you, Folks/Mates/Buddies ^^
Nicolas
P.S.: @Rodrigo_Virmond I’m also here for the girls, but I’m playing it smoothly
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Hi I am Robert from London.
I have tried Linux on and off for a few years, I think my first was Ubuntu Hardy Heron. Have forgotten much of what I have learnt, but happy to learn again.
I felt at home with Ubuntu Mate really quickly on my computer.
Hi All!
I’m known around the interwebs as Unkle Bonehead. The real name is Ryan Ridenour, RyanRide for short. I’m a truck driver in the US and these days I run mostly Michigan, Indiana and Ohio. I’ve been a podcaster and am currently running an online station called NTROradio.com. I’ve been promoting indie music either by podcast, blog or radio station since 2005 and it’s pretty much my passion before Linux. I too was a big elementryos lover but that all changed. I am really liking ubuntuMate 15.04 and it’s going to be my daily driver. If I can figure out what the problem is with IDJC not connecting to my servers it will run NTROradio as well. (It’s an ubuntu/IDJC problem.) I’m no artist but I do look forward to designing some artwork/wallpapers. I just like to play with Gimp and Inkscape and have done the logo for AustrailisOS and done work including a logo for Jonathon Nedeau of the ACF.
I’ve been using Linux since 10.04 and love it.
I look forward to being in the community.
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Hey Ryan, nice to see you here. Hope all has been well.
Yep been pretty good. Driving a lot more than I want but someones gotta pay the bills. Lol.
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