Ubuntu MATE 16.04 LTS



Ubuntu MATE is a community edition of the Ubuntu distribution. Ubuntu MATE provides users with the MATE desktop environment set up in a way that resembles Ubuntu's default look before the parent distribution started shipping with Unity as the default interface. This gives Ubuntu MATE, in my opinion, a look and feel that I have come to think of as the classic or traditional flavour of Ubuntu.



The latest version of the distribution, Ubuntu MATE 16.04, includes several key software updates, including version 4.4 of the Linux kernel, MATE 1.12.1 and support for Snap packages. The distribution has also been working on Raspberry Pi support and can be run on Raspberry Pi 2 & 3 computers. Looking over the download options we find that, apart from Raspberry Pi images, the Ubuntu MATE project supplies us with downloads for 32-bit and 64-bit x86 computers and there are builds for PowerPC computers.



Prior to downloading the distribution, I recommend looking over the list of known bugs, some of which affect the project's system installer. I did not see any major issues listed and so downloaded the 64-bit build of Ubuntu MATE which is 1.5GB in size.



Booting from the Ubuntu MATE media brings us to a graphical screen where we are asked if we would like to try the distribution in a live environment or install the operating system. On this screen we can also select our preferred language from a list that appears on the left side of the display. At the bottom of the display there is a link to the project's release notes and clicking this link launches a web browser. On launch day, when I began this trial, the new release notes had not yet been published and the most recent documents were for Ubuntu 15.10 rather than the new 16.04 version.



Taking the install option from the aforementioned screen launches the graphical system installer. The installer asks if we would like to download software updates during the installation process and whether we would like to install third-party software such as proprietary drivers, Flash and multimedia support. I selected Yes for third-party software and No for downloading updates. At this point the installer appeared to freeze for a few minutes and, just when I thought I would have to reboot to start the process over, I was asked if the installer should automatically partition my hard drive or if I would like to manually divide up the disk. The manual option presents us with a partition manager that is quite streamlined and I found it to be both fast and friendly to navigate. The partition manager gives us a nice, visual representation of our disk and makes it easy to add or remove partitions. Ubuntu MATE supports working with ext2/3/4, Btrfs, XFS and JFS file systems. While Ubuntu reportedly supports ZFS, in the Ubuntu MATE installer I did not find ZFS listed as a file system option. For people who do want to work with ZFS, there are ZFS kernel modules, userland utilities and FUSE packages in the default software repositories. I decided to use Btrfs during my trial. The following screens ask us to select our time zone from a map of the world, confirm our keyboard's layout and create a user account. We can click a box to enable encryption in our user's home directory. The installation completed quickly on my system, taking just over ten minutes. When the installer is finished we can reboot the computer to start using our new copy of Ubuntu MATE.





Ubuntu MATE 16.04 -- Welcome screen

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Ubuntu MATE boots to a graphical login screen where we can sign into our account. Upon signing in we are presented with a Welcome screen. This screen actually offers us several resources. The first page provides us with links to a beginner's guide, a features list and links to community forums along with the project's social networks. Another button launches the project's software manager. I will come back to the software manager, Boutique, later. For now I am happy to report I was able to install some packages from the software manager and the interface was both simple and easy to navigate. In general, I quite like the Ubuntu MATE Welcome screen. It provides us with lots of resources and links to documentation. Plus the quick access to a friendly package manager is helpful. My only complaint was a visual one, specifically that the Welcome application features globs of green snow that fall across the screen. It's a bit distracting and not visually appealing in my opinion.



With the Welcome screen dismissed we find ourselves in the MATE 1.12.1 desktop environment. The wallpaper is a mixture of the night sky with the Ubuntu MATE logo. At the top of the screen we find a panel that hosts the Applications, Places and System menus on the left and the system tray on the right. At the bottom of the display is another panel that acts as the task switcher. The desktop was very responsive during my trial and, personally, I found the default theme attractive. The dark colours offered both a nice frame for applications and a solid background for menu icons.





Ubuntu MATE 16.04 -- The application menu and account manager

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Running Ubuntu MATE got off to a rough start for me. When I ran the distribution in a VirtualBox virtual machine I ran into two problems. One was that the distribution did not support VirtualBox modules automatically. I had to download VirtualBox guest packages from the distribution's repositories in order to achieve full screen resolution. By default, Ubuntu MATE did not power off completely when run inside VirtualBox, though installing the guest modules seemed to clear up that problem as well.



Ubuntu MATE did not play well with my desktop computer either, but did so in a way I have not witnessed before. When booting off the live media, in either UEFI or legacy BIOS mode, Ubuntu MATE would start to boot, display the project's graphical splash screen and then turn off the video display. At first I thought the distribution had simply crashed, but a few seconds later I heard the familiar Ubuntu start-up sound, indicating the system had successfully booted. I found that while I was unable, across multiple boots, to get the system to display any visual output, I was able to use the keyboard to access the system and trigger events, such as making sounds or causing a reboot. This would indicate the system was mostly functional, but unable to display anything on the screen.



The distribution's odd behaviour prevented me from using Ubuntu MATE on my desktop computer and kept me focused on using the distribution in a virtual environment. Ubuntu MATE was stable in VirtualBox and required approximately 290MB of memory to sign into the desktop.





Ubuntu MATE 16.04 -- Running LibreOffice

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The distribution's application menu supplies us with a nice collection of popular open source programs. Firefox with optional Flash support is included along with the Thunderbird e-mail software. We are given copies of the HexChat IRC client, the Transmission bittorrent software and the Pidgin instant messaging client. Ubuntu MATE ships with LibreOffice and the Atril document viewer. We also find the Brasero disc burning software, the Cheese webcam manager, the Rhythmbox music player and the VLC multimedia player. At install time we have the option of enabling media codecs, allowing us to play a wide range of multimedia formats. The distribution provides us with the Shotwell photo manager, the Eye of MATE image viewer and a document scanner. The application menu also provides us with an archive manager, calculator and text editor. Digging in further we find a process monitor, the Caja file manager and the dconf desktop configuration manager. Also available are the Deja Dup backup software, the Synapse program launcher and the Plank dock. To help us get on-line Network Manager is available. In the background we find the GNU Compiler Collection, systemd 229 and version 4.4.0 of the Linux kernel.



There were a few entries in the application menu I thought were worth mentioning. The backup application, Deja Dup, is a very friendly backup manager and possibly the nicest tool I have encountered for creating and restoring backup archives. The program makes setting up scheduled backups wonderfully easy. The software only has a few screens and reasonable defaults. It also helps us save backup archives to a variety of locations and restoring archives is a click-click-done process.



Synapse is a program I may have used before, but I had forgotten about it.. Synapse is basically a "run program" dialog box with filtering options. It's not fancy, it just lets us type in commands we want to run and it works. Plank was another menu entry which caught my attention. I was not sure what Plank did and so I checked its description which reads "Stupidly simple" and is not at all helpful. Plank is a dock that sits at the bottom of the screen and we can launch programs from it. Plank tends to stay out of the way, with the program's default settings, hiding behind active application windows. This makes it fairly hassle free and possibly useful if we want to have a quick-launch bar at the bottom of the desktop.





Ubuntu MATE 16.04 -- The Control Centre

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One of the nicer features of Ubuntu MATE is the distribution's Control Centre. This panel gives us a central point from which to configure both our desktop environment and the underlying operating system. From the Control Centre we can set up printers, configure the network connection, tweak the look and feel of the desktop and select which applications will run when we login. The Control Centre also features modules for working with user accounts, setting the system clock, configuring the firewall and updating software packages. Each of the configuration tools worked well for me. They are generally newcomer friendly and responsive. One tool in particular I was happy to use was the Sound configuration application. By default the MATE desktop played sound effects when I changed settings or closed windows and that got annoying quickly. The Sound module gave me a way to disable desktop sound effects.



A few other configuration tools stood out during my trial. The graphical firewall manager, for example, caught my attention. The gufw program has always struck me as being a good, basic firewall utility that keeps things very simple. The latest version adds a few features. For example, we now have the ability to switch between profiles, allowing us to have one set of firewall rules for work, another for home and a third for public spaces. This can be useful when we are using a laptop or other mobile device. Logging is more up front too and available in a tab. To balance these new features and the complexity they add to the interface, a new tab has been added to gufw that provides documentation explaining the various controls. I had mixed feelings about the new arrangement. I think gufw's strength has always grown from its extreme simplicity, so I was not thrilled with the extra features. However, I am very happy to see beginner friendly documentation added and I am pleased to report the profiles feature does work. All in all, I think the changes are generally positive.



Setting up printers in Ubuntu MATE was very straight forward, involving about three mouse clicks. This year I have encountered a handful of distributions which featured a printer manager that would not work because the necessary background services were not enabled and, for a new user, there was no obvious way to enable printer services. Ubuntu MATE works with printers out of the box with no need for installing or enabling anything extra and I appreciated the ease with which I could add my printer to the system.





Ubuntu MATE 16.04 -- The Boutique software manager

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Ubuntu MATE ships with a graphical front-end for software management called Boutique. Boutique is arranged with icons representing software categories along the top of the window. Popular desktop applications in each category are listed below this top bar. Each application in Boutique is accompanied by the program's icon and a paragraph describing its function. I like that some descriptions include an "alternative to" tag. For example, the GNU Image Manipulation Program is described as an alternative to Adobe Photoshop and the Evolution e-mail client is described as an alternative to Microsoft Outlook. This gives newcomers a point of reference that I think will be useful. After each package description is an Install button we can click to download the application. Once a new program has been installed the Install button changes to become a Remove button for the application.



I found Boutique was fairly quick to respond to input and allowed me to continue browsing software categories while installations happened in the background. The one drawback to using Boutique appears to be that the program only provides us with access to a handful of programs in each category. If we want to access more niche applications or low-level packages, we will need to either use the command line APT utilities or install another package management front-end. The good news is that Boutique includes a category dedicated to providing us with other popular software managers such as Synaptic and the Ubuntu Software Centre.



One of the features of Ubuntu 16.04 which has gained a lot of attention is Snap packages. Ubuntu MATE offers the snap command line package manager in the default installation. The snap package manager appears to have changed its command syntax a good deal since we reviewed it last year. Either that or the snap package manager which ships with Ubuntu MATE is entirely different from the Ubuntu Snappy package manager that was demoed last year. The snap command line help and the manual page did not offer much assistance in discovering the features of the snap package manager. We are provided with a list of supported commands, but little in the way of an explanation of how they work. There is also no documentation, so far as I can tell, on setting up or connecting to alternative software repositories. I found that snap connects to a small default repository of software that contains about twenty applications. Installing applications using snap places the new software in the /snap directory of our operating system.



I tried a handful of available Snap applications and found that some, like the Links web browser, would work. Others, like the sshtron game and the calculator app, failed to load. At this point it seems Snap packages are still very much in the early development stages and not ready to be accessed by end users.



Earlier I mentioned that while ZFS support is not included in the system installer directly, curious users can find ZFS packages in the default repositories. I installed the available ZFS kernel module and userland utilities and confirmed they can be used to create or import ZFS storage volumes. The memory required was minimal, putting my total RAM usage just over the 300MB mark.





Ubuntu MATE 16.04 -- Running the Firefox web browser

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Conclusions



My experiment with Ubuntu MATE got off to a rocky start due to an unusual hardware issue and less than stellar support for running the distribution in VirtualBox. However, with those initial hurdles aside, I was quite happy with the distribution. Ubuntu MATE 16.04 offers a very light and responsive desktop while still providing modern conveniences. The project runs on a range of hardware (common desktop and laptop computers, Raspberry Pi devices and PowerPC computers) and offers just about everything desktop users will probably want right from the start.



The new Welcome screen provides us with lots of friendly resources and I like the Boutique package manager, I think it is very newcomer friendly and Boutique makes it easy to access more powerful package manager front-ends. The snap package manager was a bit of a disappointment as the technology is still limited and not friendly, but at least we get to see a preview of what Canonical has planned with Snap packages.



I like the distribution's Control Centre and Deja Dup backup utility, both are easy to use and powerful. I am also happy to see ZFS gain more mainstream support. We may not yet be able to set up ZFS volumes from the Ubuntu MATE installer, but having the packages in the default repositories is a step in the right direction.



Despite my initial problems getting Ubuntu MATE installed and running smoothly, I came away with a positive view of the distribution. The project is providing a very friendly desktop experience that requires few hardware resources by modern standards. I also want to tip my hat to the default theme used on Ubuntu MATE. The desktop's darker backgrounds with white text and colourful icons were much easier on my eyes than the transparent or grey-on-grey themes some projects use. Seeing full, detailed icons rather than vague, abstract shapes was a nice touch too. I feel too many modern themes look like they are designed to intentionally cause eye strain and Ubuntu MATE's high-contrast, colourful look made it easier for me to read the menus and find the controls I wanted to access. * * * * * Hardware used in this review



My physical test equipment for this review was a desktop HP Pavilon p6 Series with the following specifications: Processor: Dual-core 2.8GHz AMD A4-3420 APU

Storage: 500GB Hitachi hard drive

Memory: 6GB of RAM

Networking: Realtek RTL8111 wired network card

Display: AMD Radeon HD 6410D video card