14 DAY TRIAL // Salix MATE 14.1 RC1, a GNU/Linux distribution based on Slackware that is simple, fast, easy to use, and based on the MATE desktop environment, has been released and users can now test it.
The official Xfce-powered version of Salix 14.1 has been launched already and now the developers are working on other flavors of this distribution. It's been quite a while since we had our last Salix distro based on MATE but, from the looks of it, not much has changed.
“I have just uploaded the first RC for our Mate release. Not too many differences from the beta1 that was released a month or so ago. The very few bugs that were found with that should be fixed by now,” said the developer in the announcement.
According to the changelog, the desktop is now starting properly in the basic mode installation, Mozilla Firefox is now available as an option in the preferred applications tools, the Totem dependencies have been fixed and the application now starts properly, and SPI is no longer misbehaving when piping output instead of just displaying it to the standard output.
Also, the developer managed to update the MATE desktop environment to the latest release in the 1.8.x branch, which means that all other security fixes have been included as well.
MATE is a great alternative to the old GNOME 2 interface, but even if it looks old, that's only a trick to make it seem like it's from the previous decade. This is just one of the MATE implementations and you will find that it can look radically different on other distributions.
Also, keep in mind that this not a Live system, which means that you will have to install it in order to test it. This is not difficult to do, especially in a VirtualBox environment. We recommend that you use the automated process, but if you do decide to use a regular computer, you might want to check the settings one more time before committing to the installation.
The final version of Salix MATE 14.1 should be here by the end of the week if no major problems are reported by the community or found by the developer.
A complete list of new features can be found in the changelog. You can download Salix MATE 14.1 RC1 right now from the website.
Remember that this is a development version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only.