Tuxedo's Mutant Ubuntu MATE

My concern about the six Caja tutorials is that my own installation (U. Mate 16 LTS) has LESS features that what is described (simple example : I don’t have the possibility to color folders).
I don’t get why; the distribution was preinstalled (at my request) by the supplier Tuxedo, and I fervently applied all possible updates…
Any hint about ‘installing the latest Caja’ would be welcome -unless the tutos concern Mate 17.x, but then it’d be better to announce it in the tutos…
H.

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Hallo Herve5

Firstly,
the tutorials on the Frugal Computer Guy's website are from an installation of Linux Mint, a distro based on the Ubuntu base. Linux Mint then goes ahead and "tweaks" (customises) quite a lot of things when they prepare the ISO images for downloading/installation by individuals.

Secondly,
My 16.04.2 Ubuntu-Mate I installed myself (the machine, a fanles desktop model, was delivered with 15:10 [I think] per my request). I didn't upgrade, but rather did a fresh install because my machine has two hard drives. So I'm now running vanilla Ubuntu-Mate on a Tuxedo desktop computer.
This allows me to do this:

Via this Caja-menu:

Thirdly,
Tuxedo "tweaks"
Tuxedo apply a number of adaptations when they pre-install a distribution for a customer:

(A) Ubuntu
see ubuntufun podcast, Folge 38,


Link to YouTube video of review

(B) Ubuntu-Mate
See the Ubuntu Podcast, season 10, episode 14


(the Tuxedo Infinity book Pro review by Martin Wimpress begins at 04:45 and finishes at 25:30)

Both of these reviews were not positive about the far reaching "adaptations" carried out as compared to the vanilla flavour of each distro.

You may want to consider performing a fresh installation of Ubuntu-Mate on your Tuxedo hardware, particularly if it's a laptop.

I hope this helps you to understand the situation. :slight_smile:

Many thanks to The Ubuntu Podcast and the UbuntuFun Podcast for providing such frank and useful reviews. :slight_smile: :clap: :penguin:

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If you add costales’ PPA for color folders, you can have similar functionality, but not quite the same as on Linux Mint. I sort of wish somebody would go through the bother of figuring out their implementation and making it public for all to install because trying to mix Ubuntu with Mint core components can yield a twisted mess of libraries and put you squarely into dep hell if you go too deep into it, but for the time being this will do for colourizing folders;

sudo apt update
sudo apt install folder-color-caja
caja -q #to quit caja
caja -n #if it doesn't auto-start after quit.```
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13 inches of freedom.

Thank you very much alpinejohn!
I do understand the situation, even though I also imagine the Tuxedo guys may be motivated by the need to guarantee they hardware will work.
Mind you, Linux Mint was my choice initially, but I absolutely wanted something working straight out of the box for the S. O. (and thus the same for me), and Tuxedo only offered Ubuntu-based systems :slight_smile:

In fact I am still in the process of migrating everything from the macs, and indeed there are lots of things (dozens of email accounts with associated filters to recreate, arcane things like a 1000+ books database, an alas-proprietary worksheet without linux version, serious image processing software -on this yes I found DarkTable… even a reasonable notetaker seems difficult to find)
All of this with this feeling of not-so-secure linux installs (solutions like Firejail or Opensnitch being terribly immature compared to the OSX world) and my terror of crashing the system without being able to get back (I installed both Backintime and Timeshift, on dual-HD machine but still don’t master the art of redefining boot HD)
As soon as I find myself capable to safely design a second boot volume and install a new system without trashing the present one, I’ll definitely explore the most recent U. Mate versions -but this probably won’t happen before weeks :frowning:

Hallo Herve5

Backing up the system…

I use the following strategy:

(i)
I don’t backup the Ubuntu-Mate OS and the software that I install, I only backup my data (/home).

(ii)
If I need to re-install, I completely re-install the Ubuntu-Mate and then the software and finaly I load back my /home using my “deja-dup” backup.

(iii)
I use a double backup strategy for my /home. I backup once using the built-in backup software “deja-dup” (System > Control Centre > Backups) and once using “grsync”.

I use “grsync” to produce a non-compressed backup - this gives me easy access to any of my files should I just need to get at just one or two quickly.

If you’ve an i5 CPU, an SSD for the system and USB-3 external backup drives this all takes surprisingly little time. :slight_smile:

This strategy works for me, it’s also how I migrate between machines. :penguin:

OSX security - when you consider how long cupertino has not reacted to known security flaws in the past, seemingly pursuing a policy of keeping them secret rather than patching them, I’ll take GNU/Linux security any day. I patch my Ubuntu-Mate daily, and there are not many days without patches and software updates. :slight_smile:

OSX more secure than GNU/Linux?
An example:

I’m not knowledgeable enough to give a well-founded answer, basically all OSs are so complex, using code written by… humans!, that there must (from a purely statistical point of view) be numerous “holes” that could be exploited to attack those systems, all of them. Transparency and speed should be the guiding principles in the “patch-the-vulnerabilities” department. So patch, patch, patch. Software’s never perfect, but we (particularly in the FLOSS world) can all contribute to making it better.