14 DAY TRIAL // Ubuntu MATE leader and MATE developer Martin Wimpress is proud to announce today, March 14, 2017, the general and immediate availability of the MATE 1.18 desktop environment.
MATE 1.18 comes about 6 months after the release of MATE 1.16, during which time it was developed under the MATE 1.17.x umbrella, packages that some of you were able to install from the testing repositories of your favorite GNU/Linux distributions. The release focuses on completing the GTK+3 migration, but it also adds new features.
What this means exactly is that the entire MATE desktop environment is now based on the latest GTK+ 3 technologies. GTK+ 3.14 or latest is required to install MATE 1.18, which is no longer compatible with the GTK+ 2 series. All the included applications and components were successfully ported to GTK+ 3.
"We’d like to thank every MATE contributor for their help making this release possible," reads today's announcement. "The release is focused on completing the migration to GTK3+ and adopting new technologies to replace some of deprecated components MATE Desktop 1.16 still replied on."
Here's what's new in MATE 1.18
Prominent new features of the MATE 1.18 desktop environment release include support for the libinput library for handling touchpad and mouse input devices, updated Caja file manager with support for mouse-based back and forward navigation, notifications when external drives are safe to be removed, and copy pausing/queue functionality.
The accessibility support was greatly improved to help visually impaired users have a better MATE experience, the MATE Panel gets StatusNotifier support, Menulibre support, as well as support for desktop actions. Moreover, the lock screen is now capable of loading the user's desktop wallpaper instead of the system default one.
Furthermore, it looks like MATE 1.18 updates the notifications with support for action icons, the upower-based hibernate and suspend functions were replaced with their ConsoleKit2 equivalents, support for TTC fonts and a brand-new font browsing mode were added to the font viewer, and the MATE Calculator app makes a comeback.
The Engrampa archive manager received some attention as well in this major MATE desktop environment release, and it's now capable of recognizing WAR and EAR archives. On the other hand, the MATE Terminal app now allows users to close tabs using the middle mouse button.
Other than that, MATE 1.18 comes with an improved Atril document viewer app that promises to load pages faster and support unarchiver to handle various comic books. Numerous components and apps, including the Pluma text editor and Eye of MATE image viewer, as well as all Python and C plugins, were ported to the libpeas library.
As with any new major release of an application, lots of bugs have been squashed and numerous memory leaks were plugged. Additionally, MATE 1.18 replaces many deprecated GTK+ methods and updates several language translations. Watch your GNU/Linux distro's stable repos for the MATE 1.18 packages and update as soon as possible.