14 DAY TRIAL // The team that develops the MATE desktop environment has announced that a new stable version has been released, 1.8, featuring a large number of changes and improvements.
The MATE desktop has been forked from GNOME 2.x to address the disappearance of the classic desktop that was present for so many years on numerous operating systems.
When the GNOME development team decided to completely change the way that GNOME 3 looked and functioned, as opposed to GNOME 2.x, a group of developers started MATE in order to preserve the tradition.
Unsurprisingly, MATE has registered a lot of success and it's now one of the most used desktop environments around. This was possible because there was a lot of resentment, at the community level, towards the development direction of GNOME 3.
There are a lot of changes and improvements in the MATE 1.8 release, but we'll try to detail the major ones. The Caja file manager is the first one on the list and has received two new options, one to use IEC units instead of SI units and to get “Open parent location” option in the search view context menu.
The window manager, Marco, also has got a very interesting feature that is already present in a lot of other desktop environments, which is side-by-side tiling (window snapping).
The main Panel has gained support for Metacity keybindings in the run dialog and in the main menu, and a progress bar is now present in the logout dialog (this might be a feature unique to MATE).
A number of applet improvements have also been added. For example, the undo functionality is now available for the sticky note applet, a new “command” applet has been implemented to show the output of a command, the “timer” applet has been rewritten in C, and if the user clicks the middle mouse on the volume applet, the mute function is activated.
A number of packages have been replaced of removed. For example, mate-doc-utils has been replaced with yelp-tools, libmatekeyring and mate-keyring have been replaced with libsecret and gnome-keyring, respectively, and mate-bluetooth has been replaced with blueman.
A complete list of changes and updates can be found in the official announcement. You can download the MATE 1.8 sources right now from Softpedia but, be warned, compiling them from source might prove a little tricky.
You are better off waiting for the official MATE 1.8 packages to arrive in the repositories of the Linux distribution you are using, either Ubuntu, Linux Mint, or even Arch Linux.