Ubuntu-Mate Wily experience.

[robvand at tele2.nl]

My WiFi-dongle (Qualcomm Atheros: AR956x or AR8172, AR8176 or AR8178) isn't 
supported by Debian so most of you can skip this posting.

From all the other distros I tried, only 2 stood out:

1) Mageia-5
    Only one supporting the r8723bs "from the box"... but Mageia has a smaller
    package base.

2) Ubuntu-Mate
    Only one supporting the Keyb(KB)+Touchpad(TP) (ELAN0800) from the box.

After installing this distro on the mmcblk0p5 (bye-bye Windoze!) I managed to 
compile the Hadess r8723bs driver (only compiles under Wily, not 
yet under Xenial apparently).

Survives decoupling the KB but after recoupling, the TP doesn't work anymore.

Survives suspension (closing the lid) but only unsuspends with reopened lid 
after pressing the "Windows"-button.

Battery status only states "AC power" even if power cable decoupled.

Haven't tested making mmcblk1p1 Read-WRITE yet (don't need to because of 
zapping Windows from mmcblk0p5).

Haven't tested BlueTooth(BT) yet, nor sound, although the system occasionally 
seems to hang on sound... or the LIGHTDM display manager being run parallell 
to the SDDM (never heard of this DM before)! After removing LIGHTDM the 
systems seems to become more stable (though still hangs... on sound?).

Grub-install still doesn't work, I get a grub shell from the mmcblk0p1 and 
have to type "configfile /efi/boot/grub.cfg" before the Mate menu appears.

Caveat: the bootup generates errors, probably because I still use a custom   
            BOOTIA32.EFI form one of the earlier distros I experimented 
            with... eventually I'll have to build a "generic" one under 
           this Mate Wily system.

Hope this is of some help to some of you.

Cheers!