MATE (Entrades per Stefano Karapetsas)

Meet MATE's Mastermind

Stefano Karapetsas — Wed, 28 Jan 2015 22:17:32 GMT

I was fortunate enough to be invited on to Episode 347 of the Linux Action Show to talk a little about MATE Desktop, where it came from and where it is headed. The interview with me is embedded below.

I wasn't able to cover all the development objectives of MATE 1.10 in the time available so I recommend you take a look at the MATE Roadmap for a complete overview. If you should have any additional questions, or would like to contribute to the project, then we look forward to chatting with you in the #mate IRC channel or reviewing your pull-requests on GitHub.

Jupiter Broadcasting produce a number of weekly videocasts and podcasts mostly oriented around FLOSS. Take a look, you may find something that interests you.

MATE 1.8 released

Stefano Karapetsas — Tue, 04 Mar 2014 21:39:36 GMT

The team is proud to announce the release of MATE Desktop 1.8. We would like to thank every MATE contributor and user.

The main changes in 1.8 are:

Caja (file manager)

Added an option to use IEC units instead of SI units
Added “Open parent location” option in the search view context menu

Marco (window manager)

Added side-by-side tiling (window snapping)

Panel

Added support for Metacity keybindings in the run dialog and main menu
Added a progress bar to the logout dialog

Control center

Added support to use Metacity as a window manager

MATE Desktop library

Added MATE User Guide

Eye Of MATE (image viewer)

Added shuffle mode to the slideshow

Engrampa (file archiver)

Always display “extract to” context menu to Caja

Screensaver

Displays date and time in lock dialog

Applets

Added undo functionality to the sticky note applet
Added a new “command” applet to show the output of a command
Rewrote the “timer” applet in C
Clicking the middle mouse on the volume applet toggles mute

Dropped packages

Replaced mate-doc-utils with yelp-tools
Replaced libmatekeyring and mate-keyring with libsecret and gnome-keyring
Replaced libmatewnck with libwnck
Replaced mucharmap with gucharmap
Replaced mate-bluetooth with blueman
Merged all Caja extensions into a single package
Removed the modem lights applet, as the netspeed applet provides similar functionality

Other improvements

Fixed a lot of code deprecations
Fixed a lot of bugs
Improved the build system
Added and improved a lot of translations

As usual, we asked people from distributions that ship MATE what they think about our Desktop Environment.

Mike Gabriel, Debian developer and MATE maintainer:

I foresee MATE being one of the most used desktop environments in Debian Jessie (and beyond).

Tom Wijsman, Gentoo developer and MATE maintainer:

Some of our users express that they want to stay with GNOME 2; because they like how things used to be, they run older hardware or they want a more lightweight desktop. Given that GNOME 2 became unsupported and will eventually be removed from our meta distribution due to various maintenance, regression and security issues; MATE brings back all the glory with an active development team. Their continuation of GNOME 2's development fixes outstanding issues, brings new and useful features and keeps the good old experience alive and kicking.

Willy Sudiarto Raharjo, Co-developer of MATE SlackBuilds Project:

MATE shared the same basic philosophies of Slackware, such as simplicity, stability, and no fixed release schedule. It will be released when it's ready and preserving the same metaphor which is proven to be working well. MATE is also easy to be maintained and integrated on top of Slackware since Patrick Volkerding has given a solid foundation as the base layer in which MATE could fill the need of GNOME-based Desktop Environment which Slackware lack of since 2005. I'm looking forward for the evolutionary changes that MATE developers will integrate for the next major release of MATE.

Chess Griffin, Co-developer of MATE SlackBuilds Project:

MATE is a great desktop environment for those who like the old GNOME 2 experience. I greatly appreciate all the hard work that is put into MATE to keep it stable and mature yet at the same time incorporating new bits where appropriate. The effort to keep MATE agnostic in terms of the user's operating system or distribution is also to be applauded. I enjoy being a part of the MATE SlackBuilds project, which aims to bring the MATE desktop to the Slackware Linux community. Thanks to the entire MATE team!

Benjamin Denisart, openSUSE MATE maintainer:

The openSUSE team wants to thank the MATE developers for their efforts in providing this new version and is proud to announce the availability of gnome-main-menu, which will please users attracted by a traditional and easy to use desktop. It's a pleasure for us to work with the MATE team and we want to send them our congratulations.

Clement Lefebvre, Linux Mint founder and project leader:

MATE proudly carries the colors of GNOME 2 and continues where the project left off. In many ways and for many people MATE just feels like home. It's simple, stable and full featured. While more recent desktops experiment with new concepts, MATE provides an environment which works exactly as you'd expect it. It's popular with our users and it's the desktop on top of which Linux Mint built its technology and identity since 2006. We're very proud and very happy to support MATE and delighted with each and every new release.

Wolfgang Ulbrich, MATE maintainer in Fedora:

During the Fedora 15/16 releases I was very dissatisfied with the desktop solutions on offer. After 10 months of using XFCE I discovered MATE and decided to build my own desktop for Fedora in December 2011. This work resulted in the first external MATE Desktop repository for Fedora and was used by many users worldwide, including Fedora spins based on my packages in Russia, Latvia and Indonesia. The corollary to this work was to bring the MATE Desktop inside official Fedora together with Dan Mashal for Fedora 18. Two releases later we have a stable and usable MATE 1.6 desktop solution in Fedora 20. MATE 1.8 is currently in Fedora rawhide and will be released with Fedora 21 in the summer of 2014.

Martin Wimpress, MATE maintainer for Arch Linux:

MATE was originally created by an Arch Linux user and I am delighted that MATE is now available in the official Arch Linux and Arch Linux ARM package repositories. MATE provides a complete, fully integrated, responsive traditional desktop experience and consistent work flow on my Raspberry Pi, CuBox Pro, laptop and desktop. Brilliant!

MATE 1.8 is the result of 11 months of intense development and contains 1845 contributions by 57 people, and more than 291 translators.

MATE 1.8 Screenshots

Debian MATE Packaging Team

Stefano Karapetsas — Fri, 08 Nov 2013 02:00:00 GMT

The MATE Team is very happy to say hello to the new Debian MATE Packaging Team, that is working hard to get MATE included into the next release of Debian.

First packages are already in the repositories and there are many others in ftp-master NEW queue.

A big thanks to:

If you want to join the team, please reach the members on IRC in the #debian-mate channel @ OFTC.

MATE at openSUSE Summit

Stefano Karapetsas — Fri, 08 Nov 2013 01:00:00 GMT

Alexandros Vennos, openSUSE ambassador and member of openSUSE MATE social media team, will show openSUSE MATE at openSUSE Summit 2013 in Orlando, Florida, on Sunday, November 17 at 10:15.

The talk will be available at this page.

New repositories for openSUSE

Stefano Karapetsas — Sat, 10 Aug 2013 09:58:21 GMT

On the way to getting MATE officially available on openSUSE, the community repositories have to be changed in YaST. For that, go to YaST -> Software -> Software Repositories and remove the X11:MATE:Factory repo and next, click on the following links in function of your openSUSE version:

https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/X11:/MATE:/STABLE:/1.6/ for OpenSUSE 12.2
https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/X11:/MATE:/STABLE:/1.6/ for OpenSUSE 12.3
https://download.opensuse.org/repositories/X11:/MATE:/STABLE:/1.6/ for OpenSUSE Tumbleweed

Thank you!

MATE 1.6 released

Stefano Karapetsas — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 19:23:50 GMT

The team is proud to announce the release of MATE Desktop 1.6. This release is a giant step forward from the 1.4 release. In this release, we have replaced many deprecated packages and libraries with new technologies available in GLib. We have also added a lot of new features to MATE. We would like to thank every MATE contributor and user.

Main changes in 1.6 are:

systemd & logind support

Added support for systemd-logind in mate-session-manager, mate-screensaver and mate-power-manager (now you can reboot/shutdown without ConsoleKit)

Caja (file manager)

Improved places sidebar
Added support for new thumbnailers specification
Added a new frame for thumbnails
Wallpapers are now cached for a better memory management
New connect server dialog from Nautilus 3
Added support for freedesktop.org
File Manager DBus Interface
Fixed back vs parent directory selection
Open terminal extension now support opening a remote terminal

Panel

Added --run-dialog option to open the run dialog window Window list: you can use the mouse middle click button to close a window Workspace switcher:
Added an option to wrap around between workspaces with the mouse wheel
Added a simple way for distributions to override the default panel layout Unfortunately, due to migration to GSettings, you will lose your current panel layout. All other settings will be migrated if you have MateConf 1.4 installed.

** Marco (window manager)**

Added option to open new windows on the center of the screen

Control center

Added option to enable Marco compositing manager and fast alt-tab in window preferences
Set GSettings/GConf metacity theme if compiz or metacity are running
Use same GNOME proxy settings of gsettings-desktop-schemas package
Default applications: allow to set default terminal

Atril (document viewer)

Added XPS backend

Calc

Updated codebase
Added buttons to support inverse trigonomic functions

Notification daemon

Added option to specify which screen to display notifications on
Show always a notification if it has 'expires never' as timeout (also if screensaver is active or there are active fullscreen windows)

Themes

New GTK2/3 themes (Menta, BlackMATE, GreenLaguna, TraditionalGreen)
Added GTK3 support for other GTK2 themes (TraditionalOk, TraditionalOkTest, ContrastHigh)
Enabled text preview for text files
Added some new icons

Settings daemon

Added support for MPRIS2 to send media keys to media players
Added option to draw the background if Caja is not active
The daemon is now restarted by mate-session if it crashes

Netbook applet

Enable maximus only when window picker applet is added to the panel

Dropped packages

Replaced MateConf with GSettings
Replaced MateCorba/MateComponent with DBus
Replaced MateVfs with GIO/GVFS
Replaced libmatenotify with libnotify
Removed libmate (mate-open replaced with gvfs-open, GSettings schemas moved to mate-desktop package
Removed deprecated packages
- libmateui
- libmatecanvas
- libmatecomponentui
- mate-mime-data

Other improvements

Fixed a lot of code deprecations
Fixed a lot of bugs
Added and improved a lot of translations

We asked people from distributions that ship MATE what they think about our Desktop Environment.

George Vlahavas, Salix founder and project leader:

We believe MATE is a perfect match for Salix. MATE provides us with a familiar desktop environment that is powerful, solid and fast. Also, the MATE team are very friendly and a pleasure to work with and this means a lot to us. Thanks for giving us the choice of sticking with our favourite desktop guys

Clement Lefebvre, Linux Mint founder and project leader:

It's extremely important to us that people are happy with their computer. When that environment we all loved and worked hard to improve since 2006 was discontinued we weren't happy to let it go and to ask people to migrate to something new or something different. We worked really hard on making sure our users could continue to use their computer the way they wanted and we met a team of like-minded people who had taken the initiative to support that environment and to develop it even further. Mint and MATE go hand in hand and the relationship between the teams is excellent. Mint played an important role in the promotion and backing of MATE and we continue to help with its development. We're very pleased with MATE, it's exactly what we wanted, it started where GNOME left off and with each new iteration it keeps getting better.

Joost Ruis, strategy consultant of Sabayon:

We don't like how upstream forced changes to users and want our users to have the option to decide what to use. With MATE in our repositories we are certain our users can always choose what works best for them.

Dan Mashal, MATE maintainer in Fedora:

Ever since the release of Fedora 15 was released I was extremely unhappy and frustrated with my desktop experience until I discovered MATE. Now on Fedora I can finally have a desktop that is sane, stable, fast and most importantly easy to use. With the hard work the team has done to also patch compiz to work on the newer releases of Fedora I can now have my Fedora 14 (considered by most to be the best release of Fedora) experience back with wobbly windows, desktop cube, animations, and 3d effects. I can't stress how big of a loss this was to many users including myself. Now with MATE I don't have to worry about what is going to break with the next Gnome release and what crazy design ideas they are going to have making me have to relearn a desktop interface every single Fedora release. With MATE 1.6 I can feel right back at home on my favorite Linux distribution and get back to work.

We also asked for a comment from the company who donated the server where we host MATE services. Martin Verges, CEO of FirstColo GmbH:

We are really happy to use the MATE Desktop Environment. This way we can keep a clean and well working desktop without lots of useless and distracting stuff. Until the end of 2012 our whole company were working with Ubuntu, but with the Unity Desktop and many other "end user features", we were searching for new ways to get a desktop, free of software that pretends to make our lives easier. With MATE Desktop on Debian 7 Wheezy, we found a good working, high performance desktop that just works as we know it from years. We hope that the MATE Team will keep our classic Linux Desktop and bring to it new life some with new features, but with the good workflow kept in hand. So far, they have done great job, and we hope that soon the Debian Maintainers will add the MATE Desktop to their mirrors (and of course, that many others will use MATE too!).

MATE 1.6 is the result of 8 months of intense development and contains 1800 contributions by 39 people, and more than 150 translators.

MATE 1.6 Screenshots

New themes

Stefano Karapetsas — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 16:53:32 GMT

The team is proud to announce the new themes for MATE 1.6.

Menta will be the default theme for the upcoming new release. It consists of a nice GTK2/3 theme (based on Mint-Z Improved, no longer maintained, customized for MATE and updated for GTK3.6) and a child theme of mate-icon-theme with green folders.

There will be also other two new themes:

BlackMATE: A black based theme, without green.
GreenLaguna: A nice theme based on green color.

We would like to thank Wolfgang Ulbrich and Marcel Dijkstra for this great job.

BlackMATE theme

GreenLaguna theme

MATE University

Stefano Karapetsas — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 18:58:22 GMT

We're proud to announce our newest package on GitHub:

MATE University

MATE University is targeted at all levels of developers (including beginners) to learn how to develop new panel applets, Caja (file manager) extensions, Pluma (text editor) and Eye of MATE (image viewer) plugins, etc. to expand the already powerful MATE Desktop experience. There will be simple and well commented code, makefiles and tips to use as springboard for new MATE applications.

Thank you First Colo!

Stefano Karapetsas — Thu, 27 Dec 2012 17:06:02 GMT

FirstColo, operate a modern data center in Germany, and are planning to migrate to MATE Desktop on their office workstations. FirstColo have kindly donated a new dedicated server to support MATE.

All the team would like to thank Martin Verges and his staff for this great news!

MATE 1.2 released

Stefano Karapetsas — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 03:48:11 GMT

The team is proud to announce the release of MATE 1.2. This release is a huge step forward since the 1.0 and 1.1 development releases. MATE is more stable than ever and it includes support for many more applications, applets and backends.

Here are the main changes and improvements in this release:

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