It's now live on the Ubuntu MATE repositories

Apr 8, 2016 16:47 GMT  ·  By

The development team behind the MATE open-source desktop environment has just announced today, April 8, 2016, the release and immediate availability of the MATE 1.14 desktop environment.

Considering the fact that the version number bumped from 1.12.1 to 1.14, this is a pretty important release of the acclaimed desktop that tries to keep the GNOME 2 spirit alive amongst GNU/Linux users.

"After 5 months of development the MATE Desktop team are proud to announce the release of MATE Desktop 1.14. We’d like to thank every MATE contributor and user," reads today's announcement.

Here's what's new in MATE 1.14

If you haven't clicked the link above to access the MATE 1.14 changelog, we can tell you that it adds better GTK+3 support, especially for the GTK+ 3.20 release, and removes the old mate-conf-import tool and MateConf migration script.

Other than that, it looks like the MATE NetSpeed Applet, MATE Panel, and MATE Terminal have received some improvements, there's better Client Side Decorations (CSD) support, the Mozo and MATE System Monitor apps have been ported to GTK+3, and it's possible to enable or disable the Volume and Brightness OSD.

Now available for Ubuntu MATE users

The good news, however, is that the MATE 1.14 components popped up on the Ubuntu MATE software repositories just a few minutes ago, so you can go ahead and update your system to the new release of the lightweight desktop environment.

For our tech-savvy users, the technical release number of today's update of MATE is 1.14.0, which means that it's the first in the series. Of course, MATE 1.14 is a stable branch, so it's safe to upgrade from the MATE 1.12.1 or a previous build.

MATE 1.14.0 Changelog