I've recently switched from Ubuntu to Ubuntu Mate after hearing Martin Wimpress talk about it in the Ubuntu Podcast. I thought it could be useful to post some feedback. Maybe there are things that are quite obvious for experienced users but I'm discovering the OS as I'm typing At work I use Windows 10 and at home I switched between macOS and Ubuntu (trying to do as much as possible in Ubuntu), and now I dual boot macOS and Ubuntu Mate (MacBook Pro 2015 13").
The positive:
it's really responsive, everything feels faster than on Ubuntu and macOS Catalina.
it offers a sane and decent amount of applications.
installing software is easy. Snaps and appimages work immediately.
I didn't know Evolution was this good until I tried it out
the screen has a high DPI, and the OS immediately detects this, so all text is readable
the choice for desktop lay-outs is great. I tried the default, mutiny and settled for Pantheon. That fitted best in my workflow.
The negative:
Boutique seems to have a limited amount of apps.
It's really green after the first boot.
the scaling options for the high DPI screen are limited
adding a Google calendar to evolution is quite counter intuitive. I have multiple calendars in my account and I have to add the default calender first, save and than edit the entry to select one of my calenders. It would be easier to add the account once and than select all calendars I want to add.
I'm missing some kind of online integration to access the files that are stored on Google Drive.
I'm gonna spend some hours on tweaking and discovering more and see if I can use this as my default OS.
While I understand these are the first impressions of a new user, I would like to clarify a thing or two...
This is on purpose. The Software Boutique is a custom boutique, strictly (kinda) for Ubuntu-Mate, that makes it basically one-click to install the most commonly used apps. It has never meant to be 'all the apps available' solution.
As for google drive, I'm pretty sure that none of the Ubuntu flavors have something for Google Drive by default (as Google is pretty lame at making linux apps for their services)... But you may want to try OverGrive. While not free, it's relatively inexpensive at $4.99
@MusicalCoder's post above, plus: The new version of Software Boutique (v2.0) will be become a software centre, being able to install and discover the entire catalogue of software.
Till then, there is a More Software section that lets you install an actual software centre like GNOME Software or a package manager like Synaptic.
Some like the green, some might not. Fortunately, there are many GTK3 themes that work under MATE. It would be quite nice to have themes more discoverable in Welcome/Boutique.
We have some colour variants of the themes under testing that might be of interest:
My understanding are technical limitations with "fractional scaling" which would provide scaling between 1x and 2x, like 1.5x. It is experimental and a shared problem across a few desktop environments, and really something that will be solved when future technologies like Wayland become more prominent.
The Software Boutique is a custom boutique, strictly (kinda) for Ubuntu-Mate, that makes it basically one-click to install the most commonly used apps. It has never meant to be 'all the apps available' solution.
Thanks, I didn't know that. I used the boutique to install Spotify and the terminal & snapcraft.io for others.
As for google drive, I'm pretty sure that none of the Ubuntu flavors have something for Google Drive by default (as Google is pretty lame at making linux apps for their services)... But you may want to try OverGrive. While not free, it's relatively inexpensive at $4.99
That looks really interesting! It's cheap and it looks like it'll be worth the money.
For now I 'solved' it by installing Gnome control center and online accounts with:
After that I could start the control center and configure the Google accounts with:
XDG_CURRENT_DESKTOP=GNOME gnome-control-center
Edit: I just noticed that adding my Google accounts with this method also added the account in Evolution, so I have access to my mail, calendar, contacts and tasks.
This is a lot more user friendly than adding the services one by one in Evolution.
I like some green I started with changing the wallpaper
My understanding are technical limitations with "fractional scaling" which would provide scaling between 1x and 2x, like 1.5x. It is experimental and a shared problem across a few desktop environments, and really something that will be solved when future technologies like Wayland become more prominent.
It is a similar problem in a lot of distro's. In Ubuntu it's possible to switch to 1.25, 1.50 and 1.75 scaling too. It's something to look forward too
I'd like to add another positive impressions:
The standard workflow in Ubuntu Mate is a lot more logical than in Ubuntu (Gnome). In Ubuntu I had to install extensions to make it fit my expectations of a desktop.