What brought you to ubuntu mate and linux in general?

At this point Mate (not even sure how it's pronounced after seeing a number of folks accent the 'e': Meh-tay?) is not even close to a daily driver for me. I started learning the xNix way with FreeBSD in the early 90s but stayed in the Windows mainstream, including a 3-year stint later in my career with the "Borg" in Redmond. I like having multiple flavors of Linux on any given machine, easy once you buy a $30-50 USB3 SSD and have a machine with at least 8GB. I've never been into Linux for the "Steam-y" side, and have no issues running Ubuntu 22.04 on WSL lately; with Windows 11 you even get some rudimentary graphics experiences if you have the RAM and the CPU. I have used it to revive older hardware, like a Surface or ASUS mini-transformer, but it always comes up a bit short in one category or another (graphics, speed, security) versus a fully patched and upgraded Windows env. Yes, I know the hackers are a Windows-first operation, and during my years at MSFT, I saw a great number of devs there using Macs. Haven't gotten my hands on a M1-equipped Mac but I'll bet it's pretty difficult running Mate or any other distro, maybe it will let you boot from an external NVMe disk? I actually like Manjaro's approach, they are one of the last distros that fully embrace GNU rather than MIT or Apache licensing. I like Manjaro's stability.

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I've been using Linux since the 90s. I found Ubuntu in 2008, and really liked it, because it was a very usable environment and everything just worked. What brought me to Mate is that it also is a pleasant environment that just works.

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First tried Ubuntu in 2012 (actually Xubuntu) with version 12.04. That was on a Dell Inspiron dating to about 2003 that had a 20gb HD and 256 mb ram (it was 128 mb but they doubled it for £0). XP had virtually ground to a halt with that hardware and Xubuntu was installed to make it dualboot. It worked fine but Abiword and Gnumeric were not capable of working on some .doc and .xls files and there was no way I could get it to print a thing which alone made it pretty useless. Used it on the web mainly for a couple of years until the display became uppity, the backlighting seemed to be very intermittent.

Then in about 2014 tried Mint on another XP Dell (from 2008) that had a 250gb HD and 2 gb ram. Worked fine and with Libre Office some issues disappeared but still never got it to print another non-starter.

Then read about a version of Puppy called Phat Slakko and did one of the 1/2 way house installs. Everything worked strait out of the box and with the addition of Gutenberg drivers it printed. Used that for a couple of happy years.

Then we bought another house and I needed to do some CAD drawing for the council and contractors. No suitable Linux program appeared to exist so bought a £30 copy of Win 7 off e-bay which installed (dual boot) and no license issue with the one included in the £30 deal, it even updated to Win 10 FOC, bargain. Finally given up on that laptop recently, still works but its too old for Win 11 and the version of Win 10 on it will not upgrade again form 21H1 and that stops getting security in December this year. Still, cannot grumble, 14 years form a well used laptop is good value. Still need it as an XP machine on occasions to check the ECU set up in the track car, too tight to buy new kit for the car which would work on later setups (the ECU and data logger still have serial connectors and I have to use those pesky converters).

So now now I have installed Mate 22.04 on the Pi 400 and the 2012 Toshiba in the last couple of weeks and both are working fine. they print, scan and LibreCad is not that bad should i need it.

Happy days.

In Ubuntu Mate you have all basic necessary user apps (like Office, audio/video apps, browser) preinstalled in 1 distro and do not need to search the internet or torrents for them as in Windows. Also I liked the name of a mate tea in the OS, implying the dependency on the user and perspectives of other OS types can be designed inspired by other types of tea.
Also I stumbled upon Lunduke presentation, something like ~"Linux is everywhere" from ATM machines, household electronic devices to Mars rovers, and this was ok.

I'm an old Linux user and i have since a long time an interest in the MATE desktop (that is the continuation of the Gnome 2 desktop). I like GTK apps, i like MATE and for me Ubuntu-MATE is by far the best implementation of the MATE desktop. So, the choice was logical.

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Used Ubuntu regular since 10.04 LTS. My system Ubuntu 22.04 was becoming unstable and gnome-shell had a big memory leak, having to restart the shell every 3 days as memory usage for gnome-shell climbed to over 1 GB! . yearned for the simpler days and there it is! MATE!