My first Linux OS was a Knoppix but I had so many problems with the hardware drivers, the LAN configuration and the monitor settings that I was really discouraged. After many tests I decided that Ubuntu was the right OS for my notebooks and I continued to use it without any particularly matters till Unity.
Unity is nice to see, intuitive but if you use your OS in a stressful way (I mean doing three or four different tasks all together: reading emails, talking with Skype and writing on LibreOffice), you spend too much time looking for the icon you need to launch the right program. The vertical monitor space has not enough room to visually show all the icons related to programs I use everyday. Surely this is my personal matter but I actually prefer the “old” graphic interface. For this reason I decided to install Gnome 3 but my vetust IBM Thinkpad crashed a couple of time in a week.
To my surprise also the Gnome Classic option encountered some crashes due to the amount and diversity of the software I installed on my laptop during the last years.
As usual, after some web searches I found a solution: MATE. This particular desktop environment is a fork of Gnome 2 and it really looks very intuitive and easy to use. If some software conflicts with the MATE environment, a pop-up message will appear on your sceeen and, if you have the patience to read the Details contained in it, you will able to solve your problems. In my particular case (don’t ask me why) it helped me to focus my attention on Conduit which caused the crashes on Gnome.
To easily install MATE, on almost every Linux distribution, you can read its wiki dedicated page or directly follow the below instruction if you use Ubuntu 12.04.
– open Terminal and type these command lines:
sudo add-apt-repository "deb http://repo.mate-desktop.org/ubuntu oneiric main"
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-getinstall mate-archive-keyring
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install mate-core
sudo apt-get install mate-desktop-environment
When the Terminal finishes all the upgrade stuff, reboot your Ubuntu 12.04 and select MATE on the login screen (click on the upper right “gear” and choose MATE).
That’s all! Have a good week! 
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