14 DAY TRIAL // Ubuntu MATE 15.04 Beta 1 made its debut yesterday as an official Ubuntu flavor and it's full of interesting stuff. We've covered most of the cool aspects, but one of them really stands out and that is the ability to change the panel layout.
If you open the control center in Ubuntu MATE, you will find an entry called MATE Tweak, which is extremely useful. After you're done playing with all the stuff, you'll see that you can start testing the option called Panel layouts that can be found under the Interface entry. It's definitely one of the most interesting features I've come across in a long while and it should really be more widely adopted.
Some of you might remember that Martin Wimpress, one of the Ubuntu MATE developers, got a little bit in hot water when he revealed that it was quite easy to make the operating system look like Windows XP. That trick was done pretty much in the same manner, by rearranging the panel layout and by customizing the launcher a little bit.
Ubuntu MATE has quite a few cool features
This is just one of the features that you will find in Ubuntu MATE. In any case, the panel layouts are called MATE desktop, Ubuntu MATE, Redmond (evil grin), Eleven, and OpenSuSE. Their names are pretty self-explanatory and the changes made with this option are applied immediately, and there is no need to reboot or log off.
As a side note, from the same Ubuntu Tweak option you can also change from the regular Marco window manager to the more advanced Compiz, which also comes with some cool UI effects.
You can download Ubuntu MATE 15.04 Beta 1 right now from Softpedia and give it a spin. The feature works very well even in a Live environment and you can get to test this great release. It's not stable and you should not use a production machine.
