MATE 1.22 released

After about a year of development, a new version of the popular MATE desktop environment for Linux is out. This release contains plenty of critical bug fixes and under-the-hood improvements. Let's see what's new in MATE 1.22.

Here are the key changes in this release.

The packages will be available for Arch Linux, Linux Mint, Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, Mageia, Slackware and openSUSE very soon.

The key changes are as follows.

What's new in MATE 1.22

• The MATE panel has gotten a crazy amount of rework to make it work with Wayland display backend
  • The display applet got a full revamp, allowing for better monitor control directly from the panel
  • The timer applet now has much better mouse interaction
  • Wanda the Fish now works properly on HiDPI displays (fish image is still pixelated, keeping to its original design)
• Support for metacity-themes has finally been upgraded to version 3 in the marco window manager
  • We’ve also modernized the window and desktop switchers to make them more visually appealing
• The session manager now properly terminates all processes on systemd. Also, apps can be auto-started after a user-selected delay
• We’ve fully ported a number of programs to Python 3, including the eye of MATE and python-caja plugin libraries, as well as the mate-menus library
• The caja file manager can now optionally display desktop notifications for long-running file operations
• Eye of MATE has a reworked sidebar and better image metadata support
• Tabs in pluma now have the ability to be switched with keyboard shortcuts and mouse scrolling
• Calculator can now support up to 15 characters of accuracy. Copy/paste support was also improved a bit
• Engrampa has had support added for several new compression formats, as well as a new pause/restart functionality
• A few new key shortcuts have been added, including support for different types of media keys like Bluetooth, WiFi, touchpads, and global killswitches
• A bunch of internal housekeeping tasks have been taken care of:
  • Most of our projects have now migrated from dbus-glib to GDBus
  • We’ve improved stability across many of our projects by closing memory leaks and build warnings
  • We’ve removed old deprecated code to keep up with the latest versions of GTK
  • A lot of new and updated documentation was added/corrected
  • All of our projects now use Travis CI to ensure clean builds on some of our major distros

The various components of MATE Desktop 1.20 are available for download here: http://pub.mate-desktop.org/releases/1.22/

The complete change log can be found in the official blog post.