Mate Desktop on Armbian

[wove]

In the end Cinnamon Desktop was not to my liking. It felt a bit like a cartoon show, so I found Mate and gave it a try. It looks like a keeper.

All desktop images with Armbian are "betas" except for XFCE which is their main desktop. All Armbian images come with a curses application called armbian-config. It is a very powerful application. I used it after installing Mate to move back from beta, to the regular release. The build was not exceptionally well put together and I needed to remove several XFCE packages that still remained and install a few Mate packages that were not included.

The armbian betas also put several locks on the dconf database, which kept me from changing background, styles etc. It took me a couple days to figure out how they were freezing certain aspects of the UI. But many man pages later I was able to figure out how dconf works and remove the locks. All Armbian desktops use GTK3 desktops, so dconf is main configuration tool in all their desktops.

The stable release is well very stable, built on Ubuntu 20.04 the Mate desktop is almost a duplicate of Ubuntu Mate. It uses more resources on startup than does Cinnamon, but with a half dozen applications open, the resource usage and responsiveness is on par with Cinnamon and is not significantly different from KDE on Manjaro.

I installed Synapse for hot key activated fast file searching. It is an old application, but it is fast low resource and gets the job done. It works about the same as kicker in KDE. There are many UI configurations in Mate and I enjoy using the one that looks like Unity.

Power management is not as well tuned as it generally is on X86 hardware, but it is not too bad and certainly usable. The Pinebook Pro sleeps on command and when the lid is closed and perhaps most importantly it wakes reliably from sleep. It continues to use about 3% of the battery life per hour when sleeping, which is high enough that I shut it down overnight, but it does make the Pinebook Pro usable all day long without any concerns.

I have moved most of my data over to Armbian with Mate and will keep using it for another couple weeks. If everything stays stable and reliable, I will probably move the install from the SD card to the internall emmc, and maybe if that goes well I will look to pick up an nvme drive for the Pinebook Pro.

[crosscourt]

Im a fan of Mate and have primarily used it with Mint, Ubuntu and PCLinuxOS. Ubuntu is old school Mate but Mint has modernized it a bit more.
Still like it but KDE remains my favorite.