Tag Archives: Install

Things to do after installing Ubuntu Mate 18.04

1) Uninstall it. It is flawed in key ways. It will be difficult to get your Dropbox working, if you use that, installing software form .deb files is not automatic and requires hacking. There are some other problems too.

2) Check back here in a few months, see if I’ve updated with good news. Meanwhile, get back to whatever you were doing, because you don’t want to be doing this.

Added:

I tried to get info from Mate about the problems I encountered. They really provide no way to do that, so I tweeted about it referring to their handle, so they would see.

The tweeted back two responses. The first one said a combination of “nothing is broken” and “tough luck.” The second twee is shown in this screen grab:

That is a moving GIF with the boy’s eyes blinking. It is intended to mean, “tough shit, sucker!” or words to that effect.

(I provide a screen shot because I assume cooler heads will prevail, maybe, at Mate HQ, and the immature dickhead who tweeted that will be countermanded. Or maybe not. We don’t ever hear anything good about their development community. Only bad things.)

So, don’t look for an Ubuntu Mate explainer on this blog.

Preparing to install Xubuntu right now!

After you install Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver

Installing Bionic Beaver

I’m not going to tell you how to install the latest stable release of Ubuntu’s Linux desktop. For that, just go to Ubuntu and follow the appropriate instructions. I recommend using a bootable USB stick, and how you manage that depends on exactly what computer you are going to make it on. All three major operating systems have their own way of doing it. A quick google search will find simple instructions. The general pattern is to download the “DVD image” onto your hard drive, put a large enough USB stick that contains nothing of value into the slot, open the correct program, and tell it to put the DVD image on that stick in bootable form.

I do have this advice. If you ultimately want a certain desktop (such as XFCE or Mate or KDE or whatever), use the Ubuntu “flavor” for that desktop, things will go more smoothly. For this particular iteration, I decided to install the main Ubuntu desktop, and I’m going to try Gnome 3 for a while and see if I end up liking it.

Ubuntu 18.04 walks away from 32 bit support, and ditches Unity. The default desktop is Gnome, but this is the modern Gnome that is not that different from Unity. I generally prefer a Gnome 2.0 style desktop, so I usually use Mate (pronounced Matt ay).

Post Installation

Most of these suggestions are pretty standard for any install of any Linux system. Also, you can ignore much of this. Continue reading After you install Ubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver