Just a few of the most interesting features in 15.04

Apr 27, 2015 08:15 GMT  ·  By

Ubuntu MATE 15.04 is the first edition of this operating as an official member of the Ubuntu family, but it's been around for longer than just a development cycle. Users might appreciate if we pointed out some of the cool features that have been added in the Vivid branch.

It's hard not to love Ubuntu MATE 15.04, and it's not only about what the operating system can do; it's also about the community slowly growing around it. We further have to mention the great development team that is doing an amazing job. They started in 2014 with a simple Ubuntu remix with the MATE desktop environment, made to work on a new platform, and now they have a unique distro built with all cool features that cater to what the community actually wants.

Ubuntu MATE devs could have just settled with a simple and straightforward implementation of the MATE desktop environment, with the default apps you can find in many distros, but it wouldn't have been as exciting. Even if you are a new user, you know that a new version is exciting when you get a huge changelog that underlines changes and improvements that have accumulated over a period of just six months.

Ubuntu MATE 15.04 top features

As I said earlier, Ubuntu 15.04 comes with a large changelog, but some of the entries in there are more interesting than others. The most interesting on the list seems to be the MATE Tweak switcher, which allows users to modify, on the fly, the design of the desktop so that it resembles other distros or OSes, including Windows XP.

The developers also worked very hard to get Compiz ready for their platform. This is powerful desktop effects compositor that supports all kind of cool stuff, like nice animations, 3D interactions with the desktop, and a ton of other features.

The drop-down terminal Tilda was added by default for Ubuntu 15.04 as well, making it one of the few distros out there boasting this feature. Sure enough, drop-down terminals are available for other OSes, but very few actually go to the trouble of providing one by default.

Last, but certainly not least, Ubuntu 15.04 now has a working image for Raspberry Pi 2. Because it's a light operating system, it fits perfectly on this ARM64 platform. And, to top it all off, Ubuntu 15.04 is also one of the last Ubuntu flavors to officially support old Mac computers with PowerPC processors.

You can find more details about Ubuntu 15.04 in our original launch report.