14 DAY TRIAL // Development of the upcoming Ubuntu MATE 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) operating system was recently kicked off by project leader Martin Wimpress, who reports today on the progress so far.
First off, the development of Ubuntu MATE 18.04 starts based on the core components of its bigger brother, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS, such as the Linux 4.13 kernel, X.Org Server 1.19 display server, Mesa 17.1 graphics stack, and many of the latest security patches from upstream, a.k.a. Debian Testing (Buster) repositories.
And now for the goodies coming to the final Ubuntu MATE 18.04 LTS release next year, as Martin Wimpress and his team promise to bring hardware acceleration to Marco, MATE desktop environment's default window manager, as well as undecorated windows for the Mutiny layout for ex-Unity users.
Hardware acceleration in Marco means an extra layer of performance improvements to the 3D rendering capabilities of the OS, which users will notice mostly when playing games. However, your graphics card needs to support the DRI3 standard, which comes as good news for Intel and AMD Radeon users.
"If your hardware/drivers support DRI3 then Marco compositing is now hardware accelerated. This dramatically improves 3D rendering performance, particularly in games, and eradicates screen tearing," said Martin Wimpress. "If your hardware doesn't support DRI3 then Marco will fallback to the existing software compositor."
MATE Tweak and MATE HUD getting more improvements
A new release of the MATE Tweak utility arrived today for Ubuntu MATE 18.04 with bullet-proof layout switching, making switching of panel layouts more user-friendly. In addition, users will be able to switch layouts directly from Ubuntu MATE Welcome, which will get a major revamp soon.
Furthermore, the MATE HUD received a new default timeout of 250ms, and Noto Sans fonts are now used for users of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean languages. As expected, the artwork will be revamped as well for Ubuntu MATE 18.04 LTS with a new set of high-quality wallpapers, and you can download the dialy builds to get an early taste of these new features.
Coming next for Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) are to extensions for the Caja file manager, one that allows editing of ACLs (Access Control Lists) and xattr (extended attributes), and the other designed to allow GnuPG-based encryption and decryption of OpenPGP files. Software Boutique will get a revamp as well, and more HiDPI improvements are coming soon.
Ubuntu MATE 18.04 daily learned a new trick... Yep, Undecorated maximised windows have landed in Mutiny. https://t.co/BWr3oHrrul — Ubuntu MATE (@ubuntu_mate) November 15, 2017