MATE

MATE is an open source desktop environment, a fork of the GNOME 2 window manager, specifically designed to be used by Linux OS developers who want to create lightweight, yet usable distributions that run on low-end computers.

Similar to GNOME Classic

Just like the GNOME desktop environment, MATE is comprised of several independent packages, which means that users can install the base and then add as many packages as they want.

Default applications

When taking a peek inside the desktop environment, we can immediately notice the Caja file manager forked from Nautilus, Pluma text editor forked from Gedit, Eye of MATE image viewer forked from Eye of GNOME, and Atril document viewer forked from Evince.

Additionally, the Engrampa compression utility is a fork of File Roller, the terminal emulator app is called MATE Terminal and it’s a fork of GNOME Terminal, and the Marco window manager has been forked from Metacity.

Under the hood

The project also comprises of a screensaver, the main MATE desktop library, a panel, a control center, and a collection of applets that will expand its default functionality. At the moment, it supports only the GTK+ 2 toolkit, but future releases will definitely introduce support for the modern GTK+ 3 framework, making the project fully compatible with both.

An alternative to popular desktop environments

In only two years, the project proved to be mature enough to compete with consecrated desktop environments, such as Xfce, LXDE and even the fallback session provided in GNOME 3.

Numerous GNU/Linux distributions run on MATE

MATE is known to work (officially) on many Linux operating systems, including Linux Mint, Fedora, Mageia, openSUSE, PCLinuxOS, Point Linux, Sabayon and Salix. Unofficially, MATE is supported on Arch Linux, Debian, Gentoo, Slackware and Ubuntu Linux distributions, as well as on the FreeBSD, GhostBSD and PC-BSD distributions.

Designed for Linux nostalgics

If you’re a nostalgic and you miss the classic user interface of the GNOME desktop environment, than we have some good news for your: try MATE today!

What is new in this release:

• MATE Desktop 1.20 supports HiDPI displays with dynamic detection and scaling.
• HiDPI hints for Qt applications are also pushed to the environment to improve cross toolkit integration.
• Toggling HiDPI modes triggers dynamic resize and scale, no log out/in required.
• Marco now supports DRI3 and XPresent, if available.
• Frame rates in games are significantly increased when using Marco.
• Marco now supports drag to quadrant window tiling, cursor keys can be used to navigate the Alt + Tab switcher and keyboard shortcuts to move windows to another monitor were added.
• Support for Global Menu providers such as vala-panel-appmenu has been added.
• MATE Panel has much improved Status Notifier Items (SNI) support.
• Bookmarks now support GTK3+ locations.
• MATE Terminal now supports background images, adds Solarized themes and keybindings to switch tabs.
• Atril, the document viewer, has had a massive overhaul and is better in every single way. Yes, all ways. Better!
• In particular accessibility support for visually impaired users is considerably improved.
• Caret navigation has been added.
• The Invest applet has been dropped from MATE Applets.
• The API, provided by Yahoo, has been discontinued and there is no reputable drop in replacement available.
• Panel applets now size correctly based on the units being displayed and many graphs are dynamically scaled.
• MATE Themes have seen significant improvements to fully implement all style classes exposed by GTK 3.22
• Engrampa, the archive viewer, has improved support for encrypted 7z archives.
• MATE Sensors Applet (finally) supports udisks2.
• OpenBSD authentication is supported in MATE Screensaver and minizip in Atril supports more BSD variants.
• Translations are updated. Thank you to our team of translators!
• A-n-d for distro maintainers we've bumped the minimum GTK3+ and GLib requirements.
• GTK 3.22 and GLib 2.50 or newer are required to build MATE Desktop 1.20.

What is new in version :

• Caja (file manager):
• Added option to use IEC units instead of SI units
• Added "Open parent location" option in context menu in search view
• Marco (window manager):
• Added side-by-side tiling (windows snapping)
• Panel:
• Added support to run dialog and main menu opening with metacity keybindings
• Show a progress bar in logout dialog
• Control center:
• Added support for Metacity as window manager
• MATE Desktop library:
• Added MATE User Guide
• Added mpaste tool for paste.mate-desktop.org
• Eye Of MATE (image viewer):
• Added shuffle mode in slideshow
• Engrampa (file archiver):
• Show always the "extract to" action in caja extension
• Screensaver:
• Show date and time in lock dialog
• Applets:
• Added undo functionality to sticky note applet
• New "command" applet to show the output of a command
• Rewritten "timer" applet in c
• Mouse middle click on volume applet toggles mute state
• Dropped packages:
• Replaced mate-doc-utils with yelp-tools
• Replaced libmatekeyring/mate-keyring with libsecret/gnome-keyring
• Replaced libmatewnck with libwnck
• Replaced mucharmap with gucharmap
• Replaced mate-bluetooth with blueman
• Merged all caja extensions in a single package
• Other improvements:
• Fixed a lot of code deprecations
• Fixed a lot of bugs
• Added and improved a lot of translations

What is new in version 1.4.0:

• Numerous bug fixes
• mate-keyring and libmatekeyring backends updated and now integrate properly
• caja-dropbox package now available
• New themes added to mate-notification-daemon
• Removed indicator-applet-session
• File sharing now available via bluetooth
• Added option to use fast alt-tabbing when compositing is enabled in marco
• mate-icon-theme-faenza now available
• mate-character-map now available
• mate-screensaver now supports GDM user switching
• Removed nyancat from the mate-desktop about dialog
• Forked libwnck (now libmatewnck)
• Caja improvements:
• Restored toggle button for text based location bar
• Bookmarks can now be opened in the places side pane via the enter and space keys
• Added a button to get the difference between files in the file conflict dialog

What is new in version 1.2.0:

• Numerous bug fixes
• All conflicts with GNOME were fixed
• All configuration files were moved to ~/.config/mate
• An undo/redo feature was added in Caja
• Libmate's mate-open command is now faster to open applications.
• Mate settings daemon now supports the PulseAudio and GStreamer backends
• New applications: mozo (alacarte fork), python-caja, caja-gksu, caja-image-converter
• Artwork:
• Mate themes were renamed to avoid conflicts with GNOME
• A new MATE wallpaper was added
• MATE now features its own icon