Can you check your login screen for a gear icon. Clicking on it should give you the option of selecting the MATE DE.
I loaded mine up. to address my issue with not loading up xfce4 was to "apt remove gdm3". Then I could startxfce4 manually. Nevertheless, even being 64 bit, it is still WAY slower than raspian 32bit. I would rather run this, so any suggestion would be great. I used the latest version as of yesterday.
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can I install it like raspbian by writting iso in the sd card ?
Yup. Again, I'm not terribly impressed, seems very slow actually. I'm open to suggestions, but compared to raspian....
I have a cluster of 4 Raspberry Pi 4s i'd like to be able to run Ubuntu Mate on. Can somebody point me to the best way to help? I have until 1/6 when my new job starts to work on this and other projects.
Is tha 1st June or 6th January?
@n5yzv @quarkbuddha
I use and recommend the Unofficial Raspberry Pi 4 Ubuntu Server 18.04.3 64-bit image with XFCE and it works great with speed comparable (but still a bit slower) to the 32-bit Raspbian.
You should be able to install MATE desktop with sudo apt-get install mate-desktop
The 19.10 Ubuntu Server image will inevitability have worse desktop experience because it is not using hardware graphical acceleration for the desktop - see LP: #1850876
this is so frustrating. The Pi 4 has been out for half a year and there still isnt a decent desktop environment for it yet. Raspian is a trashfire that explodes when you try to update packages, there is no ubuntu or mate image. The only option is a kludge that breaks 3d acceleration.
I'm marking Pi 4 hardware as unusable for production due to lack of OS support.
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Did you buy a Pi4? Any research before the purchase? Perhaps you missed the notes here, this is a dev in someones spare time. If you want a better OS, start coding. There are many resources available on the internet. I invite you to come up with an OS in half a year of your free time. This isn't Kmart. I get your frustration, but I don't get why you think this is the place to vent. Your upset the original product creator didn't produce a product the way you want it, you chose to buy it, now are upset a 3rd party has not made the product do what the creators didn't fast enough in their free time? Do I properly understand the issue?
It was researched, we saw it coming and bought a truckload of PI3's to hold us over but demand was greater than we expected and we find ourselves here. We designed for Mate for various reasons.
The problem is that RPIE's marketing has exceeded its ability to others to support the product. What would have made more sense would be to have continued producing P3 until P4 had stable os support. But they have left people who are using their SOM's in the lurch, cant buy more P3 Boards and P4 still unstable.
This means we have to switch to a 3rd option and redesign our hardware to suit. A very large black mark for PI and a loss of a large customer. I get that this is a volunteer run disto, my frustration is that PI did not provide time and assistance for critical developers and projects such as Mate to port to the new hardware before calling it a RTM product.
It was appealing due to ease of use and large userbase, but now its biting me in the behind.
To be clear, the Raspberry Pi 3 (and many other models) are still in production until at least 2022-2023. The problem may be logistics for your use case. See the bottom of the Specifications table here:
Officially, Ubuntu MATE still hasn't produced a polished "tried & tested" image to download that just works out of the box. But it's possible to build a MATE environment via DIY methods, like the efforts mentioned in the link by @rstone earlier in this topic:
Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu 19.10 officially supports the Pi based on their server (headless) edition - which just requires installing the desktop environment:
From observation, 64-bit probably results in more overhead (slowness) then choosing 32-bit.
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Happy New Year!
Well, in theory the 64-bit aarch64 should be faster due to new computational CPU features supported in 64-bit mode like NEON.
Also in Linux kernel 5.2 and above there is support for some of the RPI4 GPU features like HDR as per LibreELEC 9.2.0 release notes.
With 64-bit there is an overhead to the memory though - the size of the applications is bigger and they occupy more RAM than the same 32-bit applications. Neither of those is an issue with big enough SD card and with the 4 GB version of RPI4.
In practice currently Raspbian which is 32-bit armhf is the fastest distro for RPI4 because it has Linux kernel specifically built for the Raspberry and also has GPU drivers with support for hardware graphical acceleration without which the CPU is loaded with graphics tasks.
What I like about RPI on the software side is that unlike other SOC boards it has huge community and devoted volunteers that work on improving the software and sharing their work like the Unofficial Ubuntu Server 18. 04.3 image by James A. Chambers.
Also with the announced official support by Canonical for Raspberry Pi starting with Ubuntu Server 19.10 and above and with the declared collaboration with the Rspberry Pi Foundation at some point we'll have fully supported aarch64 image with Linux kernel 5.3.x, with hardware GPU acceleration and latest CPU features, on top of which we'll be able to install Mate (or another desktop environment of choice).
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For anyone still following this thread - Ubuntu released official Raspberry Pi 4 support on 12th of February with 18.04.4 release: http://fridge.ubuntu.com/2020/02/12/ubuntu-18-04-4-lts-released/
According to the Downloads page: https://ubuntu.com/download/raspberry-pi
32 bit vs 64 bit
The Raspberry Pi 2 only supports 32 bits, so that’s an easy choice. However the Raspberry Pi 3 and 4 are 64 bit boards. According to the Raspberry Pi foundation, there are limited benefits to using the 64 bit version for the Pi 3 due to the fact that it only supports 1GB of memory; however, with the Pi 4, the 64 bit version should be faster.
You can install Mate on top of the Ubuntu Server image using:
sudo apt-get install mate-desktop-environment
After trying it I don't recommend it yet - bluetooth isn't working and graphics performance isn't good - with XFCE with compositing disabled on 1920x1080 I get around ~375 FPS from glxgears and with compositing enabled ~280 FPS and also video is not decoded in hardware when using VLC (a new VLC version with MMAL/OpenMAX IL support is needed I guess).
Use the the Unofficial Ubuntu Server 18. 04.3 image by James A. Chambers where on same setup I get ~730/1020 FPS in glxgears with compositing enabled/disabled and video is hardware accelerated in VLC.
I believe Ubuntu will improve the Desktop experience, but it's not good enough yet.
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I tried the latest official Ubuntu rpi on my rPi4b 4GB a few days ago, and found the same problems you mentioned. Plus horrific 1080p screen tearing on a toy that's supposedly able to do two 4k screens. Not just in Firefox and VLC, but even just dragging a window around the screen. I'd started with the latest rPi distro and it had screen tearing too, so for now I've just set it aside in a box awaiting upgrades. I'm happy and appreciative that the Ubuntu team is working on rPi releases, and eager to get it working because I'm just Loving my new install of 20.04 Mate Cupertino on a desktop Dell. 
you can also install the official Ubuntu server image of 20.04 for the pi4 and then load the mate desktop onto it
Has anyon tried to boot from USB MSD on a Pi4?
I copied the newer .dat/.elf files from Raspberry Pi Firmware git or an updated Raspbian SD card to my Ubuntu Server + Mate disk, both doesn't work and u-boot crying with waiting for pxeboot....
Here, here, agreed! This whole thing annoys me as well.
password not working
I tried multiple times
Still i have the same issue.
Old thread, but over the weekend I setup a Pi4B with ubuntu-mate-20.04.1-beta2-desktop-armhf+raspi.img.xz and had a great out of the box experience!
Now that Google is supporting python 3.8 for tflite and their USB3 Coral Edge TPU AI accelerator, and Ubuntu 20.04 finally has a reasonably current OpenCV (4.2.0) in the repos I was able to setup my security DVR AI add-on using only apt and pip3 installs.
Impressed me enough that I made a $10 donation to the cause.
In other Mate news, Odroid has a Mate-20.04 image for the XU-4 and similar Pi competitors, inspired by the Pi4B success, I gave it a try. It also worked a treat.
Ubuntu Mate 20.04.1 and 20.10 both have System Error popup on boot. Looks like an audio error because it boots without audio and I have to manually select the right output each time. These are clean installs on both Pi4 4GB and Pi4 8GB versions on four different SD cards - two of which came with the kits, three 32GB Class10 and one 128GB U3. Images downloaded three times from official site. Pi is hooked up to a Samsung TV. Anyone else with same problem?