Hi, I have been using Ubuntu since 2014 but am no programmer. I have been playing around with a couple different flavors and am unhappy with MATE which was much better than LITE. Now I want to go back to normal Ubuntu (I hope it’s faster because it was really slow which is why I tried other flavors) but wonder if there is an easy way to do it for someone that gets anxiety from too much techie stuff. I mean I will drop into grief in a heart beat. Current version is up to date. I tried to put download on a flash drive but unable to reformat from MATE. Thanks.
Hi,
In theory changing to different flavour graphical user interface on Ubuntu is an easy and simple task and usually it is the case. In fact you can have multiple desktop environments installed at the same time and selectively switch between any of them at your whim.
Furthermore, this is not something you should be afraid of doing because the idea is not to remove your current MATE desktop environment ( given that you have enough disk space ) but rather install additional desktop environment and if you like it you can stick to it and if not revert back to MATE.
The whole process to install default gnome comes down to the following commands:
$ sudo apt update
$ sudo apt install tasksel
$ sudo tasksel install ubuntu-desktop
During the installation, when prompted select GDM3 as your default display manager. Once ready reboot your system and select Ubuntu/Gnome session before you login. Please note that process is same for any Ubuntu version whether it is Ubuntu 20.04 or 18.04 etc.
Hope this helps
Lubos