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Comment by manaskarekar | Hacker News Reader

Just finished moving from Lubuntu (LXDE) to Mate. I loved LXDE and still think it is the best balance between no-nonsense "stay out of your way", almost all the stuff works and tweak your preferences. Sadly, that project is dead and has been replaced by the arguably better LXQt.

I don't think LXQt has reached the same maturity as LXDE just yet, but surely will eventually.

Left with the task of choosing a new daily OS, I played around with Lubuntu and LXQt, i3, XFCE, Mate and reviewed some others including the interesting NixOS.

Ended up choosing Ubuntu Mate because even though it's a heavyweight, I feel it has made a lot of right choices and works great. Even detects external monitors on plug/unplug.

If Pop!_OS was out already, I would have considered that, but so far Mate is really good.

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> Even detects external monitors on plug/unplug.

I can already hear all the Windows/MacOS folks' giggles on this one!

To be fair, I mentioned that because that's one of the biggest dealbreaker features today in many distributions (I think.)

I think there are few specific pain points in linux that always get brought up. Other than that, desktop linux is truly great.

- Suspend/Hibernate on lid/close open. (Never had trouble with this on my hardware.)

- Detecting, handling, plug/unplug external monitors. (everyone seems to come up with their own way to handle this)

- Discrete graphics switching/drivers.

- Package management. (Too many different standards, and non-truly rolling release)

My biggest beef with most distros is that every time a project reaches maturity, the rug gets pulled from under it and a brand new X (heh) is the next goal.

I've experienced this twice. Ubuntu 10.10 was peak Ubuntu for me. And Lubuntu 18.04LTS was peak Lubuntu. Both times, everything changed for the next release.

There are reasons to start from scratch, and I'm not qualified enough to comment on the decisions made by these projects, but they killed the distro for me at those two times.

We don't listen to those people. Seriously. Of Windows, MacOS and Linux, nobody other than a fanboy would say any of them get everything right.

To be honest most Linux folks giggle on this one as well, it's been more than 12 years that hotplugging screens is not an issue.

I remember having it with vanilla Ubuntu when I started using Linux in 2008/9.

Funnily enough, the other topic on the front page (Xubuntu 20.04) has the top voted comment discussing the state of external displays.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22963765

To be fair, as I've mentioned in another comment, I was not strictly talking about hotplugging alone. Detection of external displays hasn't been the issue, usability in some form or another has.

After living a year or so with Windows, two monitors and a KVM switch for one of those monitors. It ain't there yet. It does detect it but it'll just throw your stuff all over the place.

MacOS has been incredibly solid on that note.

Pop prompted me to upgrade from 19.10 about 10 days ago and has been running perfectly on 20.04 since.

Heavy? It runs reasonably well on a raspberry pi 3. Not sure why anyone would be using less than that as a desktop in this day and age.

For a smaller embedded headless device, ssh in via terminal.

> Even detects external monitors on plug/unplug.

Are you completely sure this is a strictly MATE feature? I had this feature in the past, where I think I was already on XFCE 18.04.

It is not strictly a Mate feature, but I thought it was worth mentioning.

Also, I should have been more specific, I'm not just referring to monitor detection but also combining/switching between them without any issues in various use cases.

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