MATE desktop 1.26 has been released.
‘The theme for this release has been adding new functionality’
Some 18 months of development have gone into crafting the latest stable release of this popular desktop environment.
“The theme for this release has been adding new functionality to the MATE Desktop while maintaining the look and feel that we all know and love,” writes MATE’s Johannes Unruh in the release announcement.
“While all the added features are surely quite exciting we also did not forget to do tons of bugfixing, modernising the code base and optimizing the performance.”
Interested to learn a bit more?
Read on!
MATE Desktop 1.26 Features
The latest version of the MATE desktop includes Wayland support for a swathe of desktop components and apps, including MATE Terminal, System Monitor, and Pluma.
MATE’s Caja file manager gains a new bookmarks sidebar in this update to make accessing your fave directories easier; plus support for formatting drives by right-clicking on a drive icon (though in my hands-on with MATE 1.26 in EndeavourOS, this wasn’t working).
Middle-clicking the reload button in Caja will now duplicate the current tab; while dragging and dropping web pages from a web browser on to the Caja window creates a link, just as you’d expect.
Pluma, the MATE text editor, packs a sizeable set of improvements, including a new mini map to an overview of file contexts; a grid background background to aid writing; and a handy ctrl + y keyboard shortcut to show/hide line-numbers.
Developers and coders will be especially interested to go hands on the text editor’s new plugins feature. Plugins help turn Pluma into a fully-featured IDE. Notable plugins available in bracket competition, comment/uncomment, and an integrated terminal.
There’s a new Do Not Disturb applet; the Window List applet lets you disable mouse scrolling and shows sharper window thumbnails (if enabled); and the Netspeed applet now shows more information at-a-glance.
There are new options in the Windows Preferences dialog, and some basic options for display scaling in the Display dialog (though to fractional scaling values).
Other changes:
- Reduced memory usage in Atril document viewer
- Engrampa is now able to open
.epub,.arc, and encrypted.rararchives - Power Manager now lets you enable keyboard dimming
- Window manager restores minimized windows to original position
You can learn more about this release on the MATE desktop website.