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Johannes Unruh announced the release of the MATE 1.26 desktop environment after one and a half months of development, a major update that brings numerous new features and improvements.
The biggest change of the MATE 1.26 release is the implementation of initial support for the Wayland display server, which is currently available for the Atril document viewer, Pluma text editor, Terminal terminal emulator, and System Monitor apps, as well as some other components of the desktop environment.
Wayland is slowly becoming the norm for many popular GNU/Linux distributions, and it’s great to see more and more desktop environments and apps supporting it. MATE is the latest to add Wayland support, and the new version will probably be included by default in the upcoming Ubuntu MATE 21.10 (Impish Indri) release.
MATE is comprised of numerous apps, so, as expected, the new release is packed full of updates for your favorite MATE apps. These include the Pluma text editor, which received a new mini map for a quick overview of your content, new grid background pattern to turn it into a writing pad, redesign Preferences dialog, and support for undo actions for the Sort plugin.
The Engrampa archive manager received support for Electronic Publication (EPUB) and ARC archives, along with the ability to open encrypted RAR archives, the Marco window manager is now capable of remembering the position and restoring minimized windows more reliable, and the Atril document viewer now better handles large documents.
Also improved in the MATE 1.26 release is the Caja file manager, which now lets you select a new Bookmarks sidebar, supports formatting of disk drives from the context menu, and ships an updated Caja Actions extension that allow you to add arbitrary programs to be launched through the desktop context menu.
Moreover, MATE 1.26 updates the Power Manager component to offer users a new option to enable keyboard dimming, the Control Center component to improve the Windows Preferences dialog with more options and the Display dialog with a new option for display scaling, as well as the Notifications system with support for hyperlinks and a new Do not Disturb applet.
Among other updated components, there’s the Calculator utility, which now show a history of recent computations, improved integer factorization speed, faster modular arithmetic evaluation, and additional functions (e.g. Riemann zeta function, Gauss error function), the Netspeed applet, which gained netlink support, and the Window List applet, which now features a new option to disable mouse scrolling.
For more details of the new features and improvements added in the MATE 1.26 desktop environment release, you can study the full release notes, as there were numerous bugs fixed. MATE is not something you can download right away, so you’ll have to wait until it lands in the stable software repositories of your favorite GNU/Linux distribution to update from the MATE 1.24 release.
Last updated 3 years ago
