I know you didn’t ask me, but I recently installed Debian MATE. Installation was as smooth as any other Debian install, desktop configuration was fine for me, really nothing that went wrong.
I know this is a bit of a vague response, so is there anything specific you’d like to know?
Essentially, if you had previously used UbuntuMATE, is the Debian MATE resulting in the “equivalent” interface/experience, or is anything “missing” that is only available from the UbuntuMATE distro?
Also, I only asked Jymm because he was part of the old UbuntuMATE crowd. 
No intent to snub, so glad you piped in!
at the beginning I distro hopped so much but tldr; I started with mint all the way to arch because minimalism and I believe I’ll leave arch too sooner or later too.
No, it has been years since I used it and just wanted to know if it still offered the MATE desktop. I actually like Debian but the forum is not friendly to casual users like myself. The other thing was I ran stable and so many websites I visited would tell me to update my software.
I never tried testing and would have never tried unstable. Stability and reliability are my biggest two demands. I will stick with Ubuntu MATE, as it sounds like it now has a future.
Hi, everyone
So, regarding Linux in the desktop (in my case, I should say, in laptops) I started with Ubuntu - back then, in “Ubuntu 10.04 LTS (Lucid Lynx)” that I installed, in the year 2011, in a Netbook (“Compaq Mini 110”) that I had bought a year earlier (in 2010). Actually, I told a bit of the story of that Netbook in the following post in the “Ubuntu MATE Community”:
So, why did I install “Ubuntu” in that Netbook? Simply because I heard that Ubuntu had good hardware support, it was simple to install and there were plenty of forums and web sites where one could find help, if needed.
Also in 2010, I bought an HP laptop computer: an “HP Pavilion dv6”. It came with “Windows 7” pre-installed. In 2012, I turned it into a Dual boot machine: I installed “Ubuntu 12.04 LTS ("Precise Pangolin”)” alongside Windows 7. In 2016, I decided to replace “Ubuntu 12.04” in that machine by “Ubuntu MATE 16.04 LTS (“Xenial Xerus”)“. Why? Because “Ubuntu” had chosen to switch to the “Unity” DE (Desktop Environment). I briefly experimented using “Unity” in “Ubuntu” and I decided that it wasn’t for me. I looked at “Ubuntu MATE” and I saw that the “MATE” DE (Desktop Environment) had the “traditional” look that I liked.
I also told a bit of the story of that “HP Pavilion dv6” in the following post in the “Ubuntu MATE Community”:
And I’m still using “Ubuntu MATE” to this day. Now, I’m using “Ubuntu MATE 24.04 LTS (“Noble Numbat“)”
Ah, I see, sorry! Yes, it’s difficult for me to compare it to Ubuntu MATE, of course.
I did install a Debian MATE VM though to play around in… Let’s see where it leads…
I’m enjoying all of the different paths we take to get to what our current distro is. I’m keeping my primary distro relatively small and lean, so that I can run a lot of experiments with it, mostly dealing with some combination of efficiency and diverse user interfaces. My main focal areas are text editors and Web browsers; there are plenty of diverse user interfaces within those two isolated elements of computing!
Looking forward to reading more from our wonderful diversity that we enjoy here!
But why? It was distro-hopping, of course. I distro-hopped for being not quite satisfied with DE’s and distros being tried. And only Ubuntu Mate made me feel quite at home.
That’s a more than good enough reason for making Ubuntu Mate your personal choice! I’m very happy you found the right distribution for you; I did the same thing through years of distro hopping too!
After windows I started with Ubuntu LTS. I switched to Bazzite because it was “built for gaming” and I needed something new to try. I just kept finding cool things to install from random github repos and leaning more into the cli. If I could install something and get it to work, that was a win!
I wanted less distractions from the gui, because I wanted to learn employable skills instead of just installing random stuff that made me feel cool so I tried a pre built arch install that had a tiling window manager, really cli and keyboard focused with minimal stuff so I could stay focused. I liked it but it broke.
Trying to fix it was cool but it felt like it was a setback from my career goals. I wanted to do stuff with Linux not just fix Linux. I decided I needed to find a stable distro and stick with it semi long term if I wanted to take my skills deeper.
So, I had a good long conversation with an LLM about what I liked and valued so far in Linux. Keyboard/cli focused, minimal build, being able to install experiments without making the system a mess, etc.
I ended up with Fedora Sway Atomic, not the LLMs first suggestion for me but something about the atomic idea just felt like what I wanted. And here we are. 