A Look at Ubuntu MATE 19.10 Beta

newcomers to linux are very often confused by the fact that there are strange pronunciations to words that seem to obviously spell something else in this video I am going to refer to the matei desktop over and over again and it looks like it is spelled ma te mate why am i pronouncing it that way because it is actually named after a South American plant that is turned into a drinkable brew called yerba mate a or Matta or something like that which I can't pronounce with the correct colloquialisms the developers of a boon to MIT a call it Matei so therefore I call it matei this is also part of the boom to suite of releases all the different flavors in including the main boom to version which runs gnome GN om e in the US Canada and the UK and many other english-speaking parts of the world this is pronounced gnome as of late the developers of that desktop would like you to pronounce it gun owned and the 1910 release is affectionately referred to as an EO n Herman it gets weirder and weirder as we go along just offering up this information right at the beginning of the video so we can manage some of those comments yes it's weird I know no I don't care what you call it you could call your desktop George P Schmidt lap as long as you use it and you're enjoying it greetings and salutations and welcome to this video in which we're going to take a look at a boon to Matei 1910 this is the beta release which just came out a couple of days ago I was very surprised to get an email directly from Martin whimpers the head developer of a boom Tumut a giving me a heads up about this this is one that I have been waiting for because I know there's a lot of big changes and a lot of big bug fixes he's so happy with the state of it that with the beta he went ahead and released the nice notes which is kind of unusual he doesn't expect any major changes between now and the final release date of October at the 17th I'm not going to go through these notes there's way too much to talk about but a lot has changed in a boon to this video is an introductory look I'm probably going to skip over something I may even get some things wrong this is a beta release and one thing that is pointed out is that those who download and install the beta release on their own system do so at their own risk simply because of the fact that it is a beta things are gonna change it might destabilize they might break something well I actually decided this time around that I was going to be a little bit living on the edge and I actually installed the beta I am doing this video from this beta release I've been warming up to a boon to Matei more and more over the past few months I've helped to set a lot of people up with it my brother is running it my mom is now running it on a her machine and a lot of people that I'm working with are using it and I'm using a boon to 18:04 on one of my machines right now the with the mattei desktop and it has just proven itself to be very stable and this version is proving itself to be stable as well although I've only run it for about 2 or 3 days it has been very nice to play around with so this is my desktop as I have it set up and this is what I usually do with matéo use what is known as the Redmond layout we'll get more into that in just a minute I just wanted to show you guys what it looks like and this is what the menu looks like this is the old mint menu from back in the gnome two days but that continues on under mattei matei is a desktop that happened because gnome went from gnome to to gnome 3 this is known to carried forward and those of you who have started out in Linux many many years ago we'll remember what known to look like and acted like it's very similar very close indeed so what I did was originally was install this in a virtual machine which I have running right here and this is what it looks like when you first install it so let's go ahead and fullscreen that which I can now do because in in past versions of VirtualBox like when I was using a boon to 1804 the long-term support version and I would install VirtualBox either from the repositories which was like five two or five three or something like that that you got if I went into the six series I had numerous bugs one of which was that it refused to work when it was in full-screen you just couldn't type but this works perfectly fine so this is what it looks like when you first get it and this is a layout they are calling familiar and it kind of looks like the old gnome two desktop a little bit and you see here that we have what is called the brisk menu which is from solace distribution of Linux that was started up by Ikey dirty a few years ago and he wrote this menu from scratch and Martin whimpers incorporated it in two of them to mattei and by the way this that's getting an update now and this is what the desktop looks like but one of the beautiful things about working with Ubuntu Matei is if you don't like what you see you can change it there are a lot of desktop layouts I mean a bunch so if you go into this control center application right here and we'll have to look for it we're looking for the tweak tool actually what I need to do before I do anything like that let's make these fonts in here a little bigger just so it makes it easier for everybody to see and there's the tweak tool right up right below appearance so let's go ahead and just I'm gonna crank these up it's one of the nice things I like about this desktop and this has been like this for many many years is that you have very very tight control over that so you can turn that off and make this bigger you have very tight tight tight control over the way it looks and if you don't like some you can change it not a problem I'm gonna make this really big let's get it yeah that way it's a lot easier for people to see on lower resolution devices so now let's take a quick look at how the desktop works right here and we have this lovely tool in here called meta tweak and we can decide what icons we want on the desktop so we can add a trashcan if you'd like or take it away we have a completely active desktop the gnome developers killed that in gnome 3 and now you have to install an extension to get something that kind of acts like an active desktop but it isn't this is one of the reasons that I have been warming up to using this desktop is the fact that later versions of the gnome desktop and i have been using gnome on my main machines since boom to 1804 was in beta and they shifted over to the gnome desktop a while back I have been using that and liking it very much but later versions they're getting a little bit more awkward because gnome keeps removing features so if we want to change our desktop look here we can go in and then let's look at the turning that into the redmond and it warns you that yeah you're gonna lose your stuff do you really want to do this and then I clicked ok and it will rebuild the desktop and it'll come up with a brand new layout isn't that cool and it takes a little while to get itself together let's look at some more here we have what is known as he calls this traditional I think this is the one that looks and acts a great deal like the old might a desktop or the gnome - desktop from years ago before it became matei and yes it is this is the menus that we used to have so those of you who remember playing around with a boom - when it first came along that's kind of what it looked like and then those of you who fondly remember the unity desktop which boomed - ran for several years they have mutiny and the mutiny desktop is very much like what unity was it looks and acts a great deal like it so give this a second to populate there you go that is the mutiny desktop and you can open up your menu there and you get something that looks like the old - is that cool or what man that's pretty amazing that they have that going on but what happened to my there haven't you my programs man did I close them I don't know so let's well back in the old days you used to be able to just click this and start typing so let's go ahead to that yes let's go open that back up then here we go back to where we were at a panel and this is all just moving along snappiest can be this is running in a virtual machine it's just unbelievable let's go back to redmond and you guys can explore the desktops they have a bunch of different things to choose from and once you set yours up the way you like it you move all your icons around and all that stuff let's see here we go I guess it has to close the applications to move back I don't know what's going on there but anyway don't matter oh I see we have both of them open so it minimized everything when it moved over there all right I see how that's doing that I don't usually fool around with this what I usually do is just jump in here and do what I got to do and get out but anyway once you find one that you like and you can add things to the thing here and you could move these around with a little bit of effort and you can add something to the panel usually what I add is a workspace switcher let's go ahead and grab one of those so you can see how that works and there's the workspace switcher right there and I click Add that's gonna pretty much show up where I want it if you want to move something right-click on it and go to move and then move that into place and then right-click again lock it to the panel there it is and you can run into a situation we're trying to move something and it gets stuck that's because what's next to it is locked so if you're gonna like rearrange these little icons down here in the lower right hand corner if you want to you got to unlock everything including what shows the programs right because it'll get stuck on one side of that and then it won't work it it's hard to explain I'm not gonna show it right now because it would take a bunch of time but you'll figure it out well anyway once you get this the way you want it to you can save your layout and then if you change it ever you can always go back to it so I just changed I just saved one there and called it Joe and that is saved down in the configuration file somewhere it goes along with your home directory so if you reinstall for some reason as long as you keep an intact copy of your home directory you can put it back to the way it was so that is very cool as I said VirtualBox works great in this this has been a problem child for me for a long time is that we've had all kinds of issues I'm not seeing any of them here I got a message when I first started up a virtual machine after switching over to this version that said that I needed to change the display manager within via the VM itself and just make a different choice and once I did that it worked perfectly fine and installed the latest guest additions so very happy about that because this has been a problem for a long time and I like to keep VirtualBox around simply because I'm always testing and trying new things out if VirtualBox itself is having problems then then we have issues and yes I have tried all of the other options out there I like VirtualBox it's the one that I like to use so there you go that's a real quick look around we can switch over back over to the desktop we were on here and as far as installation is concerned it's very much like every other a boon to release except now that when you choose to install third-party stuff it installs your video drivers as well so if you were one of those people that has to install like nvidia drivers like i do well then guess what that's how it works now i'm running a virtual machine and i am capturing video so that's why you are seeing the high CPU happening with the h top program even though i'm running that virtual machine i'm still only using about three and a half gigabytes of memory when this first boots up where walking maybe just about I don't know under 500 megabytes it's between 300 and 500 depending and it seems to be pretty stable there 3 or 400 that's it it's all it's using just for the desktop itself so very small memory footprint for a GT k3 desktop one of the things that has changed in this version is that we no longer have for a we no longer have the comp is compositor automatically installed we're using just Marco so let's go ahead and I'll show you where you change that this is something this is a choice that you would have done here used to be we had more choices now it's it's sticking to Marco that's fine with me comp is while it gives you the ability to do some interesting things and have wobbly windows and stuff like that it's a bit unstable and it always has been Marco is much more stable and uses much less memory so that is why they have gone to it now what they said was is that this version of Marco eliminated screen tearing which has been an issue for a very long time one of the reasons that comp is was included with the boomtube mateus because with these sorts of desktops without native compositors like you've got the big desktops like gnome and cinnamon that have those built in you can run into screen tearing issues with your video card that's when half the screen seems to lag it's very annoying in certain videos you can go on YouTube and type in screen tearing they have screen tearing test videos with bars that move left to right and you can see that happening so unfortunately for me I still had the screen tearing issue and so what I had to do was add this command to my startup and I did that in startup applications I'll show you that in just a second there is also an issue that has popped up since boom to 1904 where I get pops and clicks in my audio all the time and I was trying to figure out why this was and I found the answer and that is that they have this now set up for power saving to cycle the audio card on and off on some systems and that seems to work in mind the only problem is is that every time it turns on and off it pops and clicks so what what happen is is you click on a video and before you heard the video you'd hear pop and the video would play and then the video would be done in about five seconds to go by and then you'd hear click and that was that turning that card on and off so I found this command right here to get rid of it now unfortunately I cannot post this in the YouTube comments because this contains brackets or it are the description rather not the comments I can't post it in the comments either you YouTube does not let you post brackets so if this is something that you need I would suggest that you'd go to Google and you would go and look for NVIDIA card compositor setting and if you do that you're gonna get led to this and then you can just put that in your startup applications on your machines and as far as the sound thing is concerned I'm not sure how many people are going to get affected with that the machine that I'm running is relatively old and I guess if you were doing just like a laptop it wouldn't be that big of a deal but it turns out that it is on a machine that you have nice speakers hook to and I've got some pretty nice big speakers hooked up to this machine so you can imagine when something starts it goes pop it sounds like a gun shooting off it's like very unpleasant so that had to get fixed so I did there's some other issues here with this menu that I'm hoping will get fixed and I if I if nobody reports this anytime soon I will go off and report it to make sure you can't actually change the order of any of these things usually with this advanced menu in here you can change things and move them around but that it doesn't work it doesn't actually let you do that so that is going to have to be addressed at some point that is an old bug that has reemerged and it could be just because it's in super beta so we'll see what happens with that and this is a brand new beta I'm sure that that will be addressed and even if it isn't there's a workaround and that you can do what I did which is just to clear everything out of this favorites menu and then add them in the order that you would like them to appear so if you want the first thing to be your web browser or less as I do right here then you'd put that there and then your mail this leads me to the next point they have dumped Thunderbird for the default mail in a boon to 19:10 so now they are shipping with evolution I personally am NOT happy about that because I can't stand evolution this is a piece of software that I don't want to use I am very much invested in Thunderbird a lot of people these days don't even use webmail anymore they use or rather use a mail client they use webmail I understand that but I have several accounts to keep track of and I think a lot of people do for work and home and whatnot it's nice to have a mail client that does that without having to open up a browser you're not doing it on some webpage somewhere and I have been using Mozilla Thunderbird to do that for well over yeah about 10 years now that's how long I've been using that I had to stop and think about that so I'm not gonna change that anytime soon and I just simply I can't I can't get along with evolution it might work fine for you fortunately it's very easy to change that all you got to do is just I mean all you do is just remove evolution sudo apt remove evolution before you open it that way you don't get any configuration files on the system and then just pseudo have to install Thunderbird and bang there it is so a couple more things to show you here in the tweak let's see here oh and well I didn't mean to open that now it did a search that's another thing that this will do which is actually kind of cool but that's why I did it because I misspelled that I guess so in here we have when we go to the panel we have all kinds of little things that you can add these little features are wonderful you have keyboard LED indicators that you can turn on you can have what's known as the HUD which would go along with the Mutiny desktop that's an old feature from unity and then we have you can turn a dock on so you could put a dock down here if you wanted to and you can put a pulldown terminal in which is actually tilde which is a great little program and that activates that then you hit f12 and your terminal just shows up so what else was I going to show you guys there was a couple of other things that I wanted to mention here let's kind of get down into the nuts and bolts of the system because that has actually been updated and changed we can go ahead and close that now we go ahead and close this too let's go ahead and put this right here I want to close it thank you and we'll get out of here so let's go ahead and fullscreen our terminal and then we can use control use control and I use the shift key and then the plus to make this bigger so everybody can see it kind of got tired of that blue background so I'm going to be doing this for a while might turn the transparency off if I do any more videos with this particular setup I have been working on a series of videos and we may or may not continue that where we're doing stuff in a terminal so if we do continue it might look different it might look something like this because I'm kind of liking this right now working with the mate' terminal it's working out really well so let us talk about some of the changes in the system and that is that when we do a listing of the stuff that's in the root directory this all looks pretty much normal you can see that I have installed time shift on this system so I have that running and we have all of the regular directories that you're used to seeing in a boom - however what they have done now and I'm not really sure how I feel about this we do a long listing here you're going to see something different and that is that I will have to do a long listing of the route thank you that's my home directory you'll see here that a lot of these now aren't really directories anymore what they are is like the bin directory right here has not really been it is a link so when you are running a script that starts out with a shebang you know we're pretty used to seeing that where it starts out with the hashtag pound sign exclamation point slash bin slash bash it's actually just pointing to this link now and it's going into USR slash bin which is where now we seem to be putting all of the libraries and all of the executables we can go down here look there's s bin which is usually where system binaries are kept and that goes over to USR slash s been so this is a new thing this is something that Debian was talking about doing in ten so I'm assuming that that this is why that it's come down and a boom - and they did it and so now this is how it's done does that mean you need to go back and rewrite all your scripts now so we have to just have shebangs slash USR slash bin know as long as this link is in here it'll be perfectly alright but it is what it is and it's something that those of us who actually do dig around in the system we kind of need to be aware of and there's been several other changes as well in inbound in the system here in a boon to that quite frankly I'm not completely up on I've heard that some stuff has changed so it is what it is let's put it that way I'm not gonna keep talking because I'm probably gonna say something that I'm obviously going to get wrong I think that's pretty much all I wanted to show you other than those few little issues that we discussed everything has been very smooth very snappy very quick runs really well I've had basically no issues at all they had a they've done a wonderful job with the theming on this that's what I wanted to show you guys is look at this this is the QT integration here for the desktop this is a QT application running out here and let's open up a file manager which is kaha put them right next to each other the kaha file manager is in GT k3 and this is QT 5 and they look pretty damn similar so they've done a great job especially when you have the lovely ambience theme which is the one that I have used for years and years and years and I'm just so used to my mom prefers a theme on here called bloom inta and they've done just a great job another thing that I want to mention before we wrap this up and I am just said I haven't said a word about it is the fact that a boon to matei comes with two applications that are unique to this particular distribution of Linux and usually I just don't install them because I don't personally use them but what they what they do is is it let's go over here to empty desktops get off of there where I have this terminal open and then we will just open them up so the first one that I want to show you is let's see here I think this will get me to it know it's gonna open synaptic because I installed synaptic package manager' that's quite all right so let's see let me see the let me find the software Boutique here this is the software boutique and what this is is an application that lists software that is very useful to Linux users this is not everything that's on the system this is stuff that you're going to need to get things done things that are popular and you can see we have these lists here and we can install these applications some of these applications are not in the Ubuntu repositories they have other ways of getting them installed so let's look under internet here we can get a Flash Player on here should we need it you can install chromium you can stall Firefox you can install Google Chrome this is nice for new users who aren't real hip to the process because usually what you have to do with Google Chrome is you would have to open up Firefox and then you would have to download the Deb package and install it I have a shortcut to that I've actually written a script that installs Google Chrome it goes and downloads and installs I've shown that in past videos but people who are brand new to Linux might be going hey I'm a Google Chrome user I need to get a copy of that this is nice it's right here it's available and you just click on it so you have all of these wonderful applications that are just a click away from installing your Skype if you should still use that there you go very nice indeed and if thunderbird which i had to install and like i said i can do all this from a terminal but i am I've been around a block a few times it's nice to have an application that makes it real easy for people who are brand-new to linux to do this sorts of thing and then the other thing that we need to talk about real quick is the welcome screen which is you get as soon as you install so let's go ahead and look at that let's see in fact there we go no that's no that's the focus is correct welcome and this is really great too for new users because we go here to getting started and we have all of these choices so we can optimize the thing these optimization tools we can install drivers here we can do updates to the system just a whole bunch that's added in here we also have a shortcut to the software boutique so this will actually become the software boutique and you can start installing software so a lot of Linux you have to do something in a terminal to get going Linux Mint and a boon to matei you don't it's all point-and-click you could set up the entire system install all the software you need and it's all pointy clicking it's it's really cool so there you go gang that's kind of my look around I mean I could go on but the video is getting long in the tooth and I really kind of want you guys to look at it on your own if you're somebody who likes to play around with these things definitely give it a shot and if you find a bug in there be sure and report it kind of like that menu thing and yes by the way it does do that on both places I installed it so I know that's an issue but that's that's gonna get fixed really fast I knew that for sure and as far as the stuff that I had to add the settings for the sound and the video that's to be expected as Hardware ages and the kernel moves on they had new features some of those new features don't necessarily get along with the older hardware it's just something you have to be aware of if you are going to be working with Linux so thank you for watching as usual your feedback is always welcome check out easy Linux comm for more about Linux and it's kind of a central place where you can find out more about the YouTube channel here you can go check out the forum you can check out the Facebook page and if you do use Facebook give it a like it certainly would be appreciated and the forum which is very cool it is free secure and lots of fun we control that from the server OS on down this is not a forum that's running on some big corporate platform somewhere that they can change and take away from us and so you can feel completely assured that whatever you post there is going to be kept private and the other thing is that we don't allow no shenanigans going on in that forum people saying or doing nasty stuff we have some very good moderators there who who go through there and and alert us when things come along and so therefore definitely check that out also Jeremy O'Connell is clever wise in there and I am under easy Linux so if you see posts from either one of us that's how you know who we are in the forum and Jeremy spends a lot of time in there a little bit more than I do it's kind of his thing so be sure and give him a shout cuz all of this that this infrastructure on the web he's the engineer and he's the one who set it up and then if you'd like to learn more about what Jeremy does just go to EZ linux.com scroll all the way down to the bottom of the page there's a link directly to his website and you can find out what he does so that's it thank you for watching I certainly do appreciate it we'll do it again soon

Channel: Joe Collins

Views: 18,847

Keywords: Linux, Ubuntu, OS, MATE Desktop, Software

Id: iVzGZo5kS8c

Length: 31min 44sec (1904 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 28 2019