Why do you use Linux? And why did you choose Ubuntu MATE?

Been using Linux Since I got a hand-me-down Cyrix 6x86, 256 megs ram, and a hand-me-down copy of Red Hat 4.0 (Colgate), May 1999 was when I first installed Linux: that distro on that system.

Was tired of renting my OS from a slave master who demanded I get a newer PC at their whim and fancy. I recall getting very irritated at a Staples store, I went to get a copy of Win 3.11 because I only had a 386DX, and the store had 3 versions of Windows: 3.11, 95, and 98, and they all cost within $8 of one another, each one mandating escalating minimum hardware.

Went to Slackware, then went through many other distros. Predominantly, I return to Debian derived distros, but some recent installs leave me hanging on a system that has had MANY successful (and mostly functional) installations. Modern distros are starting to lose skills on my hardware, and that just might be a good thing, all in all.

I have minimal requirements for a desktop PC: I could care less about almost ALL media, especially Flash based stuff, because Flash hasn’t shown much love towards anything but Windows. I tend to purchase music online, and play it off line, so I store my music archives external to the PC. Updating my resume, reading email, applying for work, and maybe I’ll be able to get my VHS home movie collection digitized.

I have chosen Mate, primarily, and feel that Ubuntu is probably a good backer for this desktop environment. I used to like and use Kubuntu, but when Plasma 5 wrecked all the KDE graphics into widely spaced monochromic … (be nice) … I just couldn’t stand the pain. Mate hass pretty much what I need, though I do miss Dolphin and its KIO slaves.

Moving forward, on my 2nd day with it, I need to make some adjustments somewhere in Ubuntu Mate 16.04.3 for AMD64.

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You can use Dolphin inside of MATE, if you wish to also install the KDE backend files for it but last I tried the terminal kept spitting out errors about pixmaps.

Since your requirements are quite minimal, from the look of things if you wanted something “Better-looking” than Caja you can use Nemo just fine with Marco.

Welcome to the forum @mmmmna.

I have been on Windows from the old days of 3.11 right up to Windows 7. I have suffered through all the inestabilities, crashes, blue death screen, etc. etc. I think their best version was 3.11 where you really had control of your computer. After that, it all went to hell :smile: Windows 7 was the best (Windows OS) after 3.11 but 8 and now 10 are a disaster, you lose your privacy, Windows does what it likes with your (YOUR!) computer and the places you visit, etc. etc. etc.!. So a year ago a friend introduced me to Linux Mint… oh la la, lovely. You don’t have to download software, most packages come with the OS, you can start working, watching movies, etc. right away. And then you only need to upgrade your system and all your software gets updated! I am very happy with Linux Mint.

Then two months ago I bought the Raspberry PI 3 and downloaded Ubuntu-MATE. Fell in love the very first day and I will never never go back to Windows. For a short spell I had Wine (trying to hold on to some software) but after the hacks on Windows, I got rid of that. I have all the software I need with Ubuntu and Linux. Long live Linux and Ubuntu, and many thanks to the community that helps so much for us learning, keep up the good work (and I subscribed on a monthly basis donation because you guys so deserve the help we can give). Thanks, from a very very happy Linux user.

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Welcome to the forum @Consu and thank you for contributing :slight_smile:

Thanks tiox, I appreciate the tip!

I started using linux because I was tired of wasting time to keep the pc efficient, antivirus, defragmentation, scandisk, BSOD … with linux the time I step in front of the pc is to do what i want, sometimes even maintenance, but usually after I broke something.

I’m trying ubuntu-mate because, unity is discontinued, gnome-shell needs a little too much resources for my old pc, and mate reminds me of the good gnome2 with which I started.

Initially I did not want to use mate, because:

  • I do not love forks
  • I’m not afraid to change
  • as a classic option there was already xfce
    But now mate is a solid and active project, and how old gnome2 offers some more functionality than xfce (for how I use the pc)

Personal opinion, a strong point but at the same time weak point of gnu/linux is its fragmentation … it would be nice that when the mate project was born, its developers would have agreed with the xfce team to give place a d.e. classic and complete with the strengths of both.

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I chose Linux because Microsoft were making Windows too expensive to own legitimately; and rebuilds would take all day. Never a fan of corporations (company ethos, rather than products) I came over to Linux full time, about a decade or so, ago. I could get a distro on, patched and apps installed in less than two hours; and partitioning the /home directory meant not needing to shift data off the system to do it, either.

I was a fan of Ubuntu until Netbook Remix became Unity. I didn’t like it. Having said that, I did try; I even have the now defunct Ubuntu Phone. Given previous failed efforts at a unified interface/system that spanned desktop and mobile, I wasn’t surprised when Unity was ceased. It’s a tough nut that is difficult to crack.

For some while I was using Mint and settled there, but packages and drivers are a bit behind, and eventually I had to shift back to the Ubuntu fold, particularly for Steam gaming; but Gnome 3 isn’t to my taste. Hence I’m now hoping that Mate will be my new forever distro. Finding it a little hard going as I chose 17.10 rather than LTS, so I’m having a few issues. (for some reason, on 17.04 I went to Firefox, show all downloads, open containing folder, and then Firefox would hang, so I tried 17.10)

So for me, Mate is a nice interface, with a reasonable balance of good looks against performance, and is reasonably up to date.

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I use Linux because it does what I want - how I want it to be done.

I began using it 16 years ago. My job abandoned Windows and Mac 9 years ago.

I got a copy of PC Format UK that had a copy of Linspire on it and my Windows 98 went belly up for like the 5th time that year. I placed the Linspire disc in and the live went up and I just became really curious. Windows 98 took hours to install with no live! I followed a guide online to get UT99 up and running and have not had Windows on any of my machines since.

My kids soon followed. My wife was like the last holdout but oddly enough her job had Fedora machines here and there. Her XP and Vista (laptop) machine went belly up and so she tried Fedora and Linux Mint at the time. Now she is dedicated distro hopper. Currently on Solus on her gaming desktop and Linux Mint on her work laptop.

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I came to Ubuntu to no longer depend on Microsoft and its profit policy. I tested FreeBSD first but it was too complex for me. Then I chose Ubuntu because Dell installs it on some PC.
After trying the different desktops of Ubuntu, I chose MATE because it is closest to Windows 7 and I was able to start working instinctively. The other destops fit better with a transition from Apple or Unix.
In addition MATE is the only environment that allowed me to install a local server Apache / PHP / MySQL without too much difficulty.

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Oh oh! Solus on gaming desktop! I’m just about to try that! I will stick to UM on my laptop, but wanted to check out Solus somewhere for some time now…
Does she use it with budgie? How is the whole thing working if I may ask?

We switched to linux after IBM dropped OS/2, at first using linux was a little rough, OS/2 was better/easier than linux, even ran in 4 megs of ram. However when we upgraded our hardware we could not get drivers. I started liking linux with SuSe 4.2 - was nice and relatively easy to use. I could buy the SuSE distribution box in some computer stores, the box had the installation cds, manuals and "have lot’s of fun " stickers etc. I always had trouble understanding the rpm package system, and after using Ubuntu 6.06 decided it was better for me. We bought a Dell Laptop pre-loaded with Ubuntu 8.04 for my wife. Eventually switched to Kubuntu which is still my favorite but Ubuntu Mate works better with our older hardware. We have KDE Neon on my wife’s Acer laptop but everything else in the house uses Ubuntu Mate. One of these days we will switch her over to Ubuntu Mate as well, first step was getting her familiar with using Thunderbird rather than kmail.

We were forced to buy Windows a few times over the years when upgrading our hardware but just formatted the drive and installed linux. I don’t really hate Windows, just rather use linux.

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5 posts were split to a new topic: My story of Linux, but the desktop tends to crash

Started with Ubuntu “Orange”
ABSOLUTELY hated the attitude of those elitist jerks, started trying multiple other distros and ended up with Mint for a bit
Random suggestion to try Ubuntu Mate - was astonished. How could these 2 “Ubuntus” be related?
Sort of like Ireland’s Orange and Green - and I’m going green.

(Is this allowed?)

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I have been installing Linux since the first Slackware release. I called around town and went to the office on a Sat. to get the newly released CD disk set, I think it was in 1993 or 1994. I wouldn’t last long because I wasn’t really command line driven then. I got very frustrated trying to do common things I could do in Windows, not that I was all that happy in Windows. Making a living being a Windows Sys Admin didn’t make it easy to leave Windows later on either. In about 1999 I ran all my web services for andamo.com from a PC under my desk for about 4 years on a Linux box and for the life of me I can’t remember the distro, but I think it was Redhat (I remember RPM). I was pretty good at setting up and maintaining Sendmail and Bind DNS. I could get around in Apache back then as well. In fact I really liked messing with them. I often forget about having run my web services for so long and maintaining them. It taught me a lot about Linux.
OH, I also played a PC game called EverQuest (Evercrack) from 2002 until about 2007 or so pretty heavy. At that time they didn’t have zone maps and there was a Linux program called ShowEQ which would sniff all the packets from the Linux box on the PC running EQ. Every ingenus gamers those who wrote ShowEQ. This did teach me a lot about compiling etc …, but that was a long time ago.
Fast forward a long time, and after being out of the job market for 7+ years now 5 of which was volentary and overseas living in South East Asia. I have not been able to get a sys admin job since then, other than a SMALL bit of contract work. Not sure but it might be a combo of lack of skills, lack of a network and my age. Or it might be that I am just not all that smart, after all I ran Windows and tortured myself trying to admin it for years.

So 18 months ago, when my student Windows 10 ISO wouldn’t update I decided to go to Linux Desktop, after doing a lot of research and a few live USBs. I started on Linux Mint, then, listening to Jupiter Broadcasting shows tried a bunch of distros finally landing with Ubuntu MATE 17.10. I have been running it since Oct. 26th now and love it. Thanks to all the gang at Jupiter Broadcasting, Chris/Allan/Joe/Wes/Noah and the Beard for all your inputs and fun. So on to more of my boaring ass story.

For the most part, I LOVE Ubuntu MATE 17.10. I am not sure why I like it more than other distros. I like using apt since I know it. I also like what is available in the Ubuntu repositories. Oh, and I would be remiss in not mentioning how much I love Open Source! It is amazing what you can get for free or for free beer.
Anyway, here I am, 18+ months on a Linux desktop and never have looked back. I don’t game much since I have motion sickness really bad. I only own one Steam game, Civilization. I finally formatted the old Windows 10 drive about 6 months ago.
My stuff: What I have now is an old Dell laptop Inspiron 5547 which I am going to start a new distro install on after this post. I haven’t tried much with Redhat in many years, so maybe Fedora 27.
I currently have an Intel NUC 7th Gen i5 for my main system which is the one running Ubuntu MATE 17.10. Oh, and Bluetooth WORKS! Yeah!
I also have a ThinkServer TS-140 with a v3 Xeon running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. This is the only place you will find windows on my systems, all in Virtualbox VMs.

One last thing I have to say. The community really has changed since the early '90s. Mainly that people seem nicer, and that there is a community. It didn’t really ever seem like one even for the first few years after the Internet explosion. People don’t seem to try and OS shame as much as they did back then, though Chris at JB went off on one show about public shaming and it was awesome. Who really wants to be around dicks, we get that enough in other places in our lives.

Well, thanks for reading if you made it this far in my post.
Andamo

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I returned to Linux as my primary system after about 10 years or so. My last extended experience was Mandriva 10.x and GNOME 2.x—it still shines in my memory as the most stable, hard working, trouble free desktop experience of my life. It never complained, it never crashed, it never froze; it just worked, no matter how hard I pushed it into multi tasking. I had a Win XP virtual machine in it, but I don’t recall using it very much. I was in love with that system—I have never loved any OS other than the Mac.

When the Mandriva project died it was a great frustration to me. I tried a few other distros, including Ubuntu. I used PCLOS for a couple of months, and eventually decided to go back to Windows. Win 7 worked out for me, because by now I’ve become pretty good at mollycoddling Windows and getting it to stay up and work—just barely. I tested Win 10 on my secondary system: it crashed itself during an automatic update. It did not boot up. Then my main Win 7 system which had been pretty stable by Windows standards crashed—BSOD during bootup. I can’t remember the exact error message but it was in the ball park of file system corruption.

So, that’s the journey back to Tuxville. I just don’t want to be bothered with trying out 31 flavors of distros. I don’t have the time. I am sticking it out with Ubuntu because it appears to be a stable project, and it has the best 3rd party support. I like MATE—obviously, I loved GNOME 2! I am going to extend a lot of patience to the MATE team in their effort to bring a stable, usable Gnome-ish desktop to us. Thanks, fellas, I appreciate the effort, I really do.

Having said that, I am going to ask the following question—in the last 10 years what major progress has the Linux desktop made? Is it more stable and usable than 10 years ago? By how much?

My observations are the following:

  1. Youtube works out of the box
  2. Nvidia and Radeon graphics are not a pain in the ass
  3. VLC plays everything out of the box
  4. Wine works better; my necessary Win apps are running well
  5. Network connections are made more easily

All these are noticeable and welcome improvements. Yet, on the whole my impression is that the Linux desktop has essentially been standing still for a decade. I rate the MATE desktop experience approximately on par with Windows—that is very disappointing! I want Linux developers to understand that some substantial number of us users look to Linux precisely for stability and reliability, NOT cute features, nor the latest package of this or that.

If you’re going to call something LTS then please… PLEASE… err on the side of stability and reliability. Please only include in the default packaging whatever has been tested thoroughly, and proven to be coherent and stable. I do not want new features until after they have been tested thoroughly and integrated smoothly. That’s my idea of LTS. Please do NOT push out updates to an LTS system by default—let power users tinker if they want to.

I am looking forward to seeing a trend line of steady improvement in the MATE experience towards the point at which I would describe it—as I did my GNOME 2.x—as head and shoulders above Windows.

Good luck, and thank you for all the hard work! No… THANK YOU!!!

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Hello!

I’ve been using Gnu/Linux for many years and now I use Ubentu Mate because:
-Ubuntu finds for you proprietary drivers and for laptop I got tired searching drivers and solutions for hardware problems…
-I like Gnome 2 because for productivity is the best choice for me. I use laptop for programming an studying and graphical 3d features on desktop are beutiful (sometimes) and useless, in my opinion.
I use Contmporary panel which is a really good implementation of 2d traditional panel. I love Mate DE!

Thanks to all developers who made Ubuntu Mate the best distro I tried!
Marco

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Because I have never used anything else, and Ubuntu MATE is the most versatile and well-themed flavor of ubuntu.

And I am most familiar with debian.

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I started in about 96 with installing by floppy disk. I put that away until the boot able CD came around. I guess that was around 98.Then live CD’s came and that was a thrill.
It seemed like I needed a North American Distribution for North American hardware.
I still have a fondness for Fedora with Gnome but could not get into it for some reason. I found that down loading older versions like Fedora 10 to 14 was good for older hardware.
Mate reminds me of Red Hat 6,7, and 8.

I like SUSE, but it never seemed to run well on my computer. This was around 2000.

Now I am looking to build my second desktop with Manjaro Mate. It is a Rolling Release Distribution with a Fancy Installer.

I do like the idea of using Open Source Driver for booting and using Software updater to pick a driver for my GT240 by PNY. This little card for a while seem to not want to boot a live CD. It would lock up. Edit. That is not the case with Ubuntu Mate.

What brought me here was that in another forum someone had Ubuntu Mate on a new PPC machine.

I use Linux because I wanted to be free from expensive software, I also wanted to free myself from slow machines which take a weekend and a day to update themselves. I have been using different distros of Linux for 3 years and today, for the first time I enabled my firewall for Ubuntu MATE! I have never been infested with a virus (the machine not me personally) I really like the versatility of Linux distros, how easy they are to install with Unetbootin. I also like the way that Linux distros are unique to each other as well as completely different to Microsoft. I had an old 3TB hard drive which was not recognised by Windows 7, which was unusable and as soon as I plugged it into a machine running Linux, it worked right away.

So far Ubuntu MATE is my favourite distro, and synaptic package manager is also easy to use and efficient.

Looks like I am staying with Linux!!! :slight_smile:

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