I’m considering trying out Ubuntu Mate… was quite impressed with Mate running on FreeBSD (GhostBSD)… but I really need Ubuntu…
I need something on my main “home” laptpp running a fairly vanilla 18.04 - it’s a Dell Latitude E7270, 16 GB RAM 500 GB SSD - and the battery barely lasts 2 hours!
Working from home today, sitting out in my patio area, 8:40 am and I’m already running this laptop off the mains!
i’m a big fan of lightweight in general. i have ubuntu mate installed on my second partition because i wanted a fairly vanilla version of ubuntu as well to check my work with bodhi linux (ubuntu lts based with enlightenment de forked into one called moksha) against when i originally ran into issues trying to figure out de’s and linux in general. right now with a few firefox tabs and a few simple spreadsheets as well as a couple of terminals open i am running at 1.6 gb of my 8 of ram used. the battery on my laptop isn’t of much use, but for comparison when i used to run win10 it loaded at 1.7 gb just to start.
not trying to shill for bodhi or even change your mind. just adding that option to the mix bodhi does have it’s quirks that were a bit harder to understand when i first switched to linux full time, but someone with your experience shouldn’t have any issues.
What brand & config is your laptop? Also, what is the major differences between ubuntu mate, bodhi linux, and Linux Mint? Are they all about the same and just a learning curve to switch between any distro? Just wondering. Or is it the DE that makes the difference?
my regular laptop is a lenovo (even to this day i keep trying to type ibm. i do have a 32-bit ibm thinkpad T60 that i keep to test 32-bit systems on as well) thinkpad T430s. it has moderate specs considering what is on the market these days: quad core i5 (64-bit) with 8 gb of (ddr3) ram and still rocking an old school 500 gb hdd. i am not a power user (or gamer for that matter) by any means so those specs are plenty for any and every task i have ever needed it for.
i believe you are quite correct as far as my experience with bodhi and ubuntu mate (mubuntu) goes. the major difference between them feels like it is mostly the de. however, i don’t spend a whole lot of time working in mubuntu. there may be some other fine points under the hood that the developers have worked out, but for the most part bodhi is just unbuntu with a lesser used de known as enlightenment that the developers chose to fork and call moksha.
i haven’t used mint at all yet. i keep meaning to add it to a spare partition, but never seem to make that come to pass
I too have fallen for the charms of Maté. I have a Live USB with 19.04, which is immensely attractive, and I have just installed the DE on my existing 18.04.
A question about the mate-tweaks applet.
It offers options on Panels but I have not found screenshots that explain the difference. It also warns me that choosing either of the two options (Gnome2 or OpenSuse) will change everything. Oy!
I’m running Mate desktop on GhostBSD on a Lenovo W500 (2 cores, 8 GB RAM and 256 GB SSD)… I can’t use the onboard discrete graphics, nearly everything barfs when I try (it’s some ancient ATI/AMD radeon chipset - Windows drivers support hot switching between onboard Intel GPU and Radeon) - I got it to work (no hot switching) with Ubuntu yonks ago (~5 years) when discrete enbabled in BIOS - but ever since I cannot even boot an installer when the Radeon is enabled in BIOS.
Anyway - Mate on BSD on that Lenovo is quite snappy… GhostBSD have some tweak tool that lets you move the window control widgets to the left - something I couldn’t find when I most recently tried Mint Mate…
Did a bit of a test run of Ubuntu Mate in virtualbox… thought - “yeah - I can work with that…”
Wiped my main home laptop (Dell Latitude E7270) which I was running bionic beaver on (vanilla with gnome) - and installed Ubuntu Mate 19.04… don’t like it… it’s ugly - everything’s tiny - even with every font ramped up to 14 points - and too hard to get “assistive” to do stuff like upscale fonts so I can read them on this 13" 1080 screen… refused to bluetooth pair my MS Designer Mouse or my Sony bluetooth MBR headset…
And both chromium and google-chrome look pig ugly in Mate compared to gnome on Ubuntu 18.04, 18.10 or 19.04. And I really kinda hate Mate’s file manager… it feels / looks like “tech” from the noughties - which I guess it is - being gnome 2.x based…
So going back to Ubuntu, but 19.04. I’ll wear the excessive draw on power - use a power brick out on the patio if needs be (like I’m doing now anyway)…
Seriously, give Manjaro Mate a spin. Manjaro is quite the opposite of Ubuntu in terms of out-of-the-box level of customisation and tweaking. You’d probably be able to get the desktop scaling dialed in better with Manjaro. The KDE flavor of Manjaro is also very light (much lighter than Ubuntu).
I like Manjaro - but - I just haven’t used it enough to know how difficult it is to get stuff working… like Checkpoint SNX VPN client, I need this!
There’s stuff I need for work - Checkpoint SNX being one… also need rdesktop, xfreerdp and remmina… without SNX I was using a Windows 7 VM in virtualbox - ghastly… don’t need that anymore… unless my employer decides to update their checkpoint - I REALLY hope they don’t!
I’ve tried Manjaro XFCE on a Netbook - Samsung N150 - it was great… but this laptop I tried Ubuntu Mate on is my “main rig” at home - that I use for “everything” - web surfing, watching movies, working after hours and remote… sheesh took me months to get Checkpoint SNX working in Ubuntu - not gonna try that in anything non-Ubuntu / Debian…
I’ve got a Phenom II desktop machine with NVidia (GTX650 ti - getting a bit long in the tooth) that I use for games that need a decent 3D GPU (e.g. Borderlands 2, and The Pre-Sequel) - running Bionic Beaver…
Progress : 2nd wipe of this Dell E7270 in less than 24 hours - after giving up on Ubuntu Mate - got everything I need running on Disco Dingo now - after maybe 3 hours? - my 6 GB of Dropbox is sync’d, my 150 GB of ResilioSync sync’d, Chromium, Checkpoint SNX, Steam - and most importantly Age Of Empires II HD working through Steam Play / Proton!!!
Got my NAS mounted over NFS - and everything is good again…
Bluetooth Microsoft Designer Mouse paired on FIRST attempt!
Bluetooth Sony MDR-X650BT paired on FIRST attempt! (the trick with these in Ubuntu 18/19 is to set them into pairing mode everytime I want to connect [don’t need to do that in Android] a bit clumsy, but it works).
I think I need to buy a new battery for this laptop - that will hopefully solve my problems of needing to be tethered to the mains…
bodhi does have it’s quirks that were a bit harder to understand when i first switched to linux full time, but someone with your experience shouldn’t have any issues.
