Full Circle Magazine FR

I recently decided to try Ubuntu 14.10 with varied results. The Unity desktop froze about 10 seconds after loading; three separate installs produced the same problem. I suspect it may be to do with the Nouveau video driver but I never got time to install the Nvidia driver. I then tried with the Gnome 3 desktop, and this worked ok – but it pre-installs many apps which I don't like such as Brasero and Rhythmbox. It is also impossible to uninstall them as they are closely tied to the Gnome desktop, and always warn you that they will uninstall the desktop. There is nothing wrong with Rhythmbox, but I just prefer Clementine. Brasero may be all right for some, but, for me, in every distro I have tested, it says I don't have a writeable CD/DVD – a problem I don't have with xfburn or K3b. Also, I'm not a fan of Gnome 3, and hated the random distribution of icons all over the desktop. And it would not allow installing Calibre due to incompatibilities with other drivers – so this ruled it out for me. Last week, I impatiently opened my FCM#92 and came across a reference to Ubuntu with the Mate desktop. There is no mention of this in Distrowatch so I went to https://ubuntu-mate.org to find out more. It is a version that emanates from the USA. The download is only 983MB, but it keeps timing out so I suggest you use a torrent. This is so different from standard Ubuntu that it deserves a completely separate review. Of course it uses the solid Ubuntu underpinnings, so credit to the Ubuntu team, but the end user experience is mainly due to the Mate team. They have stuck to tried-and-true applications, so everything just works as it should.

I always partition my system before the install, and do a manual install to avoid any trouble with my other installations. Other users have reported problems with trying to partition via the Ubuntu installer, but, as I had already partitioned, I did not need to worry about this. The install process went off without a hitch and took just 30 minutes. On rebooting, the Grub menu was the best I have ever seen, and the visuals through the login to the desktop showed the artistic talent of the Mate team. I was immediately alerted to the availability of updates which installed seamlessly. First impressions last longest, and I was impressed. Immediately confronted with a nice blank desktop, and all user actions can be done via a panel and a traditional menu; some people would say 'old fashioned' – not 'traditional'. However, it is a well known system which groups all the apps in sensible categories. My first job was to configure to my tastes which are based on Mint LMDE with Cinnamon desktop. The Control Centre had a section for additional drivers, and it automatically selected the drivers for my NVidia card and installed them. My wifi drivers were installed automatically during the setup. It had 2 panels, but the bottom panel held only 2 applets; I moved these to the top panel and removed the bottom panel. I adjusted the width of the panel from 24 to 32px and the icons became huge, probably 32px. By experimentation, I found that 31px was the optimum size to suit my eyesight and use the 24px icons. It is easy to install applets to suit most needs (and all of mine). In addition to the Menu Bar, I used Date, Volume, Network, Language, Workspace Switcher, Shut-down and Trash applets. I also installed an applet to display open windows. They are all easy to configure, although the help option does not work, but is not needed. The menu bar had three categories “menu”, “system” and “places”. I found this took up too much of the top panel, and I did not need “places”. It was easy to remove and replace with the standard Mate menu. A right-click enables you to add, remove or move any menu items. You also have options to add an advanced menu which includes favourites, but needs a further click to see all applications; it also runs slow as it loads large icons for favourites. It is easy to add, experiment and remove any of these applets.

One of my favourite add-ons is Themes; there is a great choice available from the Control Centre and, coupled with a range of beautiful wallpapers, you can certainly find a combination to your liking. Now we come to the software. Everybody has different tastes; I like a distro to be kept lean and let users add their favourites later. Mate strikes a balance supplying essentials like Firefox, Thunderbird, Image Viewer, Pluma Text Editor and Simple Scan, among others. The only items I would like to uninstall are Pidgin, Brasero and Rhythmbox. Unfortunately, all these are tied to the Gnome desktop and cannot be uninstalled but the menu items can be removed. I also installed many other apps and utilities; they were all available in the repositories, except grub-customizer, and all the dependencies were available so I had no install problems. This is the only distro I have reviewed that I would consider using instead of my Mint/Cinnamon default. Everything just works as it should and it is blindingly fast with no fancy graphics. It works happily with the Nouveau drivers whereas Cinnamon and KDE must have NVidia drivers on my machine. I like the panel because it is so easy to add/move/delete applets and app launchers. My only gripe with my Cinnamon desktop is the difficulty of doing this. On the other hand, the Cinnamon menu does open on hover, whereas the Mate menu must be clicked. The Mate menu I used did not have any favourites, but I do not find this a problem because I always put mine on the panel.

I found one oddity with Conky and this may be of interest to other Conky users. I use Conky to display system temperatures and fan speeds on all my workspaces by including “own_window_type desktop” in the .conky.rc file and this normally works fine. In Mate the window disappeared from all workspaces when I gave focus to any desktop icon. I solved this by changing the line to “own_window_type override”. If you are new to Linux, and looking for a productive system that works out of the box, then this is for you!