Hi
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.