14 DAY TRIAL // The Debian users can now rejoice because the latest version of MATE, 1.8 is now available in the official repositories.
Getting MATE ready for Debian has been hard work for the MATE Packaging Team, but it looks like they’ve pulled it off.
“The MATE desktop environment is a fork of what was formerly known as the GNOME v2 desktop environment. The MATE upstream developers have performed a really good job in integrating the old GNOME code with latest technologies like DConf an GSettings.'
"The next upcoming release of MATE (which will be the 1.10 series) will also have GTK3 support (if things go well!). During the last 6 months several people have worked on the provisioning of MATE packages in Debian. The initial workload has now been completed,” said the developers.
To make things even more interesting, all MATE packages have been uploaded to the Debian unstable branch and users can even test it in Debian Wheezy.
The MATE desktop environment is gathering quite a following and it looks like all the people who are missing the good old days of GNOME 2 will be very happy. Besides Debian, it seems that Ubuntu might get a MATE version, so the future of this desktop environment is bright.