I've be playing with ubuntu since 7.04 server (jaunty jackalope).

in 2014 i pulled together debian wheezy + mate desktop to create a custom environment for the high school i'm working for, featuring python 3 and some of its popular frontends (pyzo, spyder) + many scientific softwares (sqlitetudio, scilab 5, geogebra, algobox, etc...)

Mate desktop is now my desktop manager of choice