Use Ubuntu MATE 14.10 Make it an official distro.

[grndzro]

I just installed Ubuntu Mate 14.10 and so far it is excellent. I have hated Ubuntu since they ditched everything for Unity. The Ubuntu devs ARE considering making this an official distro.

MATE is actively developed and is going to be GTK3 and Wayland. The new AMD driver 14.9 supports xorg 1.16 and it has all the latest packages from the get go.
For being a beta it is very good. No problems so far. If you like the old school Gnome2 feel it is great and is pretty customizable.

Motivations for installing this is to flip the bird to Unity and MIR. If Cannonical makes UbuntuMATE an official distro it will have to support both Wayland and MIR.
Please install and give it a try. Polish wise it feels like an official DE already. It is that good. Go ahead and look up opinions and reviews. You wont be dissapointed.

Personally I usen an expanded bottom bar with double row task manager on autohide. Everything can be moved around.

[grndzro]

It can be found here

https://ubuntu-mate.org/

[Panix]

I just installed Ubuntu Mate 14.10 and so far it is excellent. I have hated Ubuntu since they ditched everything for Unity. The Ubuntu devs ARE considering making this an official distro.

MATE is actively developed and is going to be GTK3 and Wayland. The new AMD driver 14.9 supports xorg 1.16 and it has all the latest packages from the get go.
For being a beta it is very good. No problems so far. If you like the old school Gnome2 feel it is great and is pretty customizable.

Motivations for installing this is to flip the bird to Unity and MIR. If Cannonical makes UbuntuMATE an official distro it will have to support both Wayland and MIR.
Please install and give it a try. Polish wise it feels like an official DE already. It is that good. Go ahead and look up opinions and reviews. You wont be dissapointed.

Personally I usen an expanded bottom bar with double row task manager on autohide. Everything can be moved around.

Anything is better than KDE which is a big steaming pile of cow dung.

I only use one more distro with it and soon it will be zero. So many bugs with that POS. Mate, Cinnamon, XFCE and even LXDE are okay with some nuisances here and there, sometimes. Not sure about Unity. I use Ubuntu with Gnome at the moment - one distro - out of three for now. It's okay as I got used to it but it still isn't ideal and I don't like the desktop much. Unity is probably worse but I don't have software problems and bugs. I just don't like the functioning of it. MATE, I have used before and I hope it develops. Linux needs a good functioning desktop besides the typical Gnome and KDE that dominates the landscape.

[scjet]

maybe they should just call this what it really is: "MintBuntu 17"
...and LinuxMint Mate 18, will still be kicking the crap out of ubumtu -go figure?.

[Luke]

I switched to MATE about a month ago, love it

I had migrated an OS that originated as UbuntuStudio Jauny back in 2009 to Cinnamon after previously using GNOME 3 with the Frippery extensions in response to the GNOME3/Unity mess. About a month ago I switched it over to MATE in response to rough video and window drawing in Cinnamon after having run Firefox. Added Compiz, which temporarily requires Emerald if you want to be able to theme the window borders due to upstream changes somewhere. MATE intends to fix that in the future. Finally added two small Cairo-dock docks right over the MATE panel so the menu and system tray could be themed to look like Cinnamon.

All that customization was a lot of work but a hell of a lot easier than all those failed efforts to find the video bug Firefox was triggering in Cinnamon. Far smoother with Compiz-or with Marco-than Cinnamon ever was. Not sure rather all that inherited GNOME3 JS or the use of the clutter toolkit (slow) is the reason for the video issues I started getting with the Utopic Unicorn alphas over the summer.

Now I hear MATE has a clear roadmap to becoming usable with Wayland, and I am hearing nothing about similar development of Cinnamon. Mint developed Cinnamon in-house after GNOME kept breaking the extension interface. Guess what? Right now the Frippery bottom panel still can't be made to work in Ubuntu's gnome-shell! Contrary to claims of a "stable extension interface," GNOME is still breaking user customizations with every new release. No wonder Mint had to fork it. MATE was developed elsewhere and seems to be developing faster, and came from a far lighter and frankly superior codebase, using compiled binaries instead of scripts.

In my opinion, Ubuntu Unity should be reconfigured into a phone/tablet interface only, with focus on getting some kind of usable GPU driver for Mir (or even SurfaceFlinger) for the little ARM devices. Ubuntu's core desktop distro should become the new MATE version. I'd love to see UbuntuStudio come back to MATE, thus returning to the DE they were forced away from in 2011. Only thing is, XFCE works well for them and it would be a lot for their team to handle to do another DE transition.