By default, Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish sports the GNOME desktop environment, or no GUI at all in the server edition. If you would like to install mate instead, the GUI can be downloaded and installed directly from Ubuntu’s package repositories.
This can be done whether you are switching from GNOME to Mate, or you currently are running command line interface only and wish to install mate desktop. The mate desktop is a great choice that comes with all the tools you will need to administrate your Ubuntu system.
In this tutorial, we will go through the step by step instructions to install the Mate GUI desktop environment on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish.
Privileged access to your Linux system as root or via the sudo command.
Conventions
# – requires given linux commands to be executed with root privileges either directly as a root user or by use of sudo command $ – requires given linux commands to be executed as a regular non-privileged user
Install MATE desktop on Ubuntu 22.04 step by step instructions
We will be using the tasksel command to install MATE desktop GUI. In case the tasksel command is not available on your system you can install it with these commands:
$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install tasksel
Execute the following command to begin the MATE desktop installation, depending on which package you wish to install. The ubuntu-mate-desktop package will come with more MATE apps installed by default and the ubuntu-mate-core is lighter with less software.
If you already have GNOME installed, you should receive a notification during MATE installation to let you know that you will now have multiple display managers installed. If you want Ubuntu 22.04 to boot into MATE desktop by default, then you will need to set your default display manager to lightdm when the prompt appears. Use TAB to select lightdm` and hit the ok button.
👁 Prompt asking us to switch over to sddm display manager Prompt asking us to switch over to sddm display manager
After installation, you can reboot your Ubuntu 22.04 system to load into the MATE desktop environment.
In this tutorial, we saw how to install the MATE desktop environment GUI on Ubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish Linux. MATE is a speedy and responsive desktop environment, which comes loaded with a lot of its own applications to make your system administration that much easier. Ubuntu 22.04 and MATE desktop is a great combination that you are sure to enjoy – many will find they like it a lot better than the default GNOME environment on Ubuntu.
