I’ve always had a soft spot for ‘alternative’ operating systems and even though I’m quite satisfied with the performance of Windows 10 on my new computer, I wanted to install a Linux distribution in dual boot again.

I’ve been fiddling around a lot with other variants of Linux like Arch Linux, Debian, Fedora and Slackware. While each of them have their pros and cons (I really, really do like Arch Linux!) I’m simply more at home with Ubuntu variants as I’ve been running Ubuntu on and off since the Hoary Hedgehog days.

The first problem I ran into though, was that I really, really dislike the Unity desktop environment. Just like with the Metro UI in Windows 8/8.1 and Gnome 3, it has the feel of being optimized for touch use. I just want a simple desktop environment. During my fiddling around with Arch Linux I really came to like Cinnamon as it was really efficient and not too shabby to look at.

However much I liked Cinnamon, I did end up defaulting back to MATE as this is was the good old Gnome 2 was like. MATE being a fork of that, means I felt right at home. With the announcement that Ubuntu MATE was picked up by Canonical from 15.04 and onwards I decided that this would be the way to go for me.

The job of installing Ubuntu MATE alongside Windows 10 on my computer in UEFI mode with Secure Boot enabled gave me trouble though. More on this subject in my next post.