Ubuntu MATE 18.04 LTS Review - Unity Salvation

Thank you for this video I had downloaded software Ubuntu mate for raspberry pi 4 or 3 b version

Just a quick comment, I did a clean install Mate 18.04 on an old laptop and it was a little slow but everything worked. So that test lead me to install Mate 18.04 on my old tower using the upgrade tool. It went well. I had to run a few commands to get back the welcome center and software boutique and was able to get my epson printer to scan with Image scan getting the linux drivers from epson. I could not get my epson scanner working on 16.04 for some reason. In any case, once again I am pleased with Mate, 18.04 has about the same user experience in terms of speed on my old tower, so I would say that I did not lose any ground speed wise with the upgrade! Very good!

I came back to this video as I am going to upgrade from mate 16.04 to 18.04. I have been a little hesitant as I run a very high quality but old tower with only 4 gigs of DDR2 Ram. This has worked fine for me in 16.04 as I don't edit video or game, my main use is just simple business use. As time moves on I have seen other distros become a little heavy for my rig, but I was so impressed with Mate 16.06 and the way it has worked for me. As of this posting I have installed 38 different Linux distros, not including updated versions, that would mean I have done about 100 Linux installs. I still use Puppy from time to time and some older versions of distros that had a special feature I might need, but my favorite has been Mate. Thank you quidsup for your great reviews and thank you Martin and team for your great work!

Moving from KDE NEON to Ubuntu MATE. This is a great bit of Kit!!!! So much customization out of the box. I love the contemporary layout. That is how I had my KDE setup. This is fantastic.

I got the plasma on my desktop, because I simply cannot live without plasma, an I'm considering MATE for my ThinkPad X220. I like the way it looks.

Really really great review. I too just discovered this distro and am stunned (and am considering leaving KDE also) but I'm a bit more dissapointed in the accessibility for low vision people. You can expand the screen panels put there is no text size adjustment anywhere in the environment.

KDE has a setting in the OS where you can smoothly scale everything in the desktop environment with a slider, however this doesn't apply to the inside of applications.

Meanwhile you didn't mention a particular trick that Ubuntu Mate can do.. Both Firefox and VLC for example are integrated into the theming engine. If you change your interface theme, both of these apps immediately alter to match. This is BRILLIANT! 👍

If font sizes could be integrated into this scheme...

One other thing missing is the full screen zooming really needed by low vision people as is done in MacOS and Windows (and KDE) where an ALT-<mousewheel> will instantly zoom the whole screen in and out and let everyone see even the smallest features on your desktop.

Thanks for letting me vent. 😇

does this finilly have the AMD drivers? this why i havent updated from 14.04.5 lts

Other than system fingerprint on install, like Ubuntu Gnome, does it also have popcon like Ubuntu? I just can’t tolerate and privacy risks

EDIT - I'm happy to say Ubuntu Mate 18.04 has been fixed and now is smooth as 16.04. Don't ever scare me like that again MATE.

Wise words. It is mystery why Gnome 3 was chosen as standard DE for Ubuntu, when KDE and Mate are so superior.

This looks very unlike Gnome 2. And it uses more system resources. What a shame.

Is it compatible with a HP Pavilion g6?

"Ubuntu MATE offers salvation for Unity desktop lovers.." Yeah, all 3 of them.

this is an amazing release and very well implemented

What I don't like about Mate is the snot green colour. Can this be changed to the nice standard Ubuntu dark orange?

It is green. *Green*.

Just like Unity 2d!

The Mate desktop is quite a salvation for us who like to stick to the traditional layout and yet try out small incremental upgrades to the UX now and then. It's stable, fast, low on resources and a perfect example of why Gnome should have stuck to the traditional layout. Ubuntu Mate and Mint Mate are both top quality software which are actually enjoyable to use.

Can you help me on how to make windows games work on Mate 18.04 LTS please. I have tried many different method even Wine and didn't make it. Please can you show me easy way step by step on this Mate? I will appreciate it in advance.

I would love to use this but I've fallen in love with elementary
:') maybe duel booting may be a solution to have these two amazing OS at once

Great review, I only wish you could slow it down a bit when talking or maybe I'm just slow? Cheers!

Can't wait to install Ubuntu Mate 18.04 because I love it.

How to install ltsp Ubuntu..? [ [ [ Installing Thin Client ] ] ]

What I don't like in Mate desktop is that you can't change the size of desktop folders as in xfce desktop...

I'll need to look into this.
I currently run Debian or Arch on all of my systems w/ KDE. However this video shows me Compiz comes with the Ubuntu MATE install.
I've ran into so many problems with Arch and Compiz that I went to KDE. Are all the Compiz plugins and shit available at install [edit] of Ubuntu MATE [/edit]? Or are other packages/repos needed?

Mate team has to put a option and let us to change this green color everywhere. Is the only thing that pulls me out from it.

Ubuntu MATE 18.04 makes Gnome as default seem like an overweight joke.
Really, there's nothing special about gnome besides the amazingly good extension system.

nice freaking review! :) what's the memory usage (RAM) on fresh boot?

In my opinion Mutiny is better than Unity has ever been. It has nearly all of Unity's features but unlike Unity it is fast and way more tweakable.

Thanks for the kind words, I'm delighted to see you liked Ubuntu MATE 18.04. I think we might let you down for 18.10 though, we're going to dedicate most of the next cycle to fixing as many bugs as we can in, 18.04 and only have a few incremental improvements planned.

I think that's the highest praise I've seen you give in years. I have it on one of my machines and can agree- it's damn good. Still using Gnome on my two more powerful machines though. It's just so nice looking to me.

I've tried Mate few times before but I hated it to the core. This time, it looked so compelling I installed it on vbox again and... I am impressed. For the first time I see Mate as something I could use, at least on older, weaker machines. I would still miss many Plasma features but Mate meets most of my needs, especially Mutiny layout that works very good. Calendar is still an abomination and the borders on the panel are showed and look awful and there are still many things that I am on the fence with, but in overall, this looks really good for a lightweight DE. Or is it lightweight DE? This seem not to be so true anymore and with Plasma being more optimized and better on resources, lines become blurry...

Now that it's on gtk3, is there a wayland session or is it X11 only?

Like most Gnome based desktops I've seen it still looks big and clunky to me. KDE Plasma 5 is cool! OK, so I'm biased. :-)

I don't like how Brisk is maximized on Mutiny. It looks weird IMO. I personally like and use Contemporary, mainly because I have Unity layout on my Kubuntu laptop.

I'm gonna install this on my dad's desktop, but I think I'm gonna leave it on Unity by default, until it'll no longer receive updates.

I love the Mate 16.04 and after this review I will certainly give the 18.04 a look. I agree with quidsup, Mate, it is one very very good distribution.

worked awesomely on my laptop but not so much on my computer...

Just upgraded. Transition was successful.

The only thing I hate is that godawful green everywhere.

Good. I need this to update an old netbook with outdated Firefox & Chrome browsers. I hope the minimal and 32 bit install media will work. Sometimes I am lucky and the wifi driver is found. Fingers crossed.

Ubuntu MATE is arguably the best Ubuntu distro, I just wish they add a color scheme changer since green isn’t everyone’s color. Polish nonetheless

From the perspective of a new user who needs to download newly released 3rd party software applications from websites, would software stated as being compatible with ‘Ubuntu’ also follow the exact same installation instructions by tech support (who primarily familiar with Ubuntu) if being installed in Ubuntu Mate? Or would the steps involved and/or the terminal commands be different? I’ve tried installing some software recently in Ubuntu Mate 16.04 and the 3rd party softwares chat support couldn’t help me as they said the installation process seems to different in Ubuntu Mate and they weren’t familiar enough with it, I later found the software had successfully installed by adding ‘linitian’ and also the file was located in a different place than where they said it would be in Ubuntu? also had another software which gave error notifications, although someone said that may be because it was only designed for 17.10 or later Ubuntu distros which is why Mint users in forums said they couldn’t install it at all?
I prefer Ubuntu Mate to Ubuntu but software compatibility and the ability to follow exact installation instructions is a deal breaker for me until my skill level is good enough to know how to communicate with the terminal
Thanks for the help

Oh boy, this distro looks sweet. I am definitely going to try it out! Thanks!! 😀

You make me sad. So Gnome 2 is replaced with Unity again. I know it's Mate, but saying Mate is great because it looks like Unity is an insult to Mate. Of course you can make it look like Unity, but I guess we see history repeating itself. I could probably make Openbox look like Unity if I didn't have a life. Oooooo have you seen Ubuntu Mate it looks just like Ubuntu Unity. Dump your desktop now and run back to the crap that was an awful desktop design.

If you are a nerd stay with Kubuntu, else go to Xubuntu or Ubuntu Mate. Xubuntu is slightly more robust, but Mate has more options. Using Ubuntu Mate with 3d acceleration in Vbox shows a minor but annoying "time travel" bug. The screen goes back in time for a second or so. During typing, that is annoying, you type, the letter appears, disappears for ½ a second and re-appears again. In the begin I thought, I did not push the key hard enough. Also the graphs of Conky or system monitor go back in time for close to a second. I have seen the same problem in Ubuntu 16.04.

Ubuntu, Kubuntu and Ubuntu Budgie do not work at all with 3D acceleration enabled in Vbox, the login does not work. The bug reports I produced, have a low priority. Probably not very many users, use 3D acceleration and in case of any problems they simply disable it. I like to keep it, because it gives me 65%-85% of the performance of the "bare metal" video.

Might be just me, but the Welcome ap is still flakey... It used to crash every time, but now it runs, and it uses about 50% of the available CPU....
But mostly, it is a very tidy release, quite ready for prime-time.

Ubuntu Mate - I've heard of this :)

I'm in love, I might make the switch to MATE completely.