A new version of the MATE desktop has been released
MATE 1.26 released
This release might have taken a little longer than usual but now after 18 month of development we are very pleased to release MATE 1.26.
What’s new in MATE 1.26
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. 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.
The headline changes in MATE Desktop 1.26 are:
- We added Wayland support for Atril, System Monitor, Pluma, Terminal and other components of the Desktop. Furthermore Calculator and Terminal can now be built with Meson.
- Pluma was subject to massive improvements.
- There is a new mini map which gives you instant overview over the content.
- The new grid background pattern turns Pluma into a writing pad.
- The sort plugin now supports undo actions.
- We added a show/hide line-numbers shortcut, namely Ctrl + Y.
- The preferences dialog needed a redesign to catch up with all the new features.
- Together with the brand new Pluma Plugins our text editor can be turned into a feature-rich IDE with support for Bracket completion, Comment/Uncomment code, Built-in terminal and Word completion.
- The Control Center features an improved Windows preferences dialog with more options. In the Display dialog we added an option for display scaling.
- Notifications became even more useful as they gained support for hyperlinks. And we finally added a Do not Disturb applet.
- Speaking of applets, the Window List applet has a new option to disable mouse scrolling. The optional window thumbnails are now crisp and clear as they are rendered as cairo surfaces.
- The Netspeed applet shows more information by default and gained netlink support.
- The Calculator was ported to the GNU MPFR/ MPC library which means more precision, faster computation and additional functions (e.g. Riemann zeta function, Gauss error function).
- We finally added a history to show recent computations.
- Calculator is now resizeable when the history is activated.
- Vastly improved integer factorization speed.
- Much faster modular arithmetic evaluation (modular exponentiation ability).
- In the file manager Caja you can select a new Bookmarks sidebar. Caja gained support for formatting drives from the context menu. The Caja Actions extension which allows you to add arbitrary programs to be launched through the context menu is now part of the Desktop.
- Scrolling through large documents in Atril is a lot faster now since a slow linear search has been replaced by a binary tree search. The document viewer’s memory footprint got even smaller as a EvWebView is now only created if needed.
- The window manager Marco now restores minimized windows to its original position more reliable.
- Engrampa got support for Electronic Publication (EPUB) and ARC archives. In addition it can now open encrypted RAR archives.
- The Power Manager has a new option to enable keyboard dimming and has been ported to libsecret.
- Most About dialogs have been updated with nicer descriptions. Because small things matter :-).
- We fixed a lot of bugs, some memory leaks and modernised the codebase of almost all of the Desktop components.
- There is a new Wiki which makes it easier for new contributors to join our project. We urgently need motivated people so do not hesitate to contact us or start contributing.
- Translations are updated. Thank you to our team of translators!
The various components of MATE Desktop 1.26 are available for download here:
MATE 1.26 released
