Mate 1.1 Arrives

Jun 17, 2015

Popular desktop environment continues the Gnome 2 legacy – with new support for the Gnome 3 toolkit.

The MATE desktop team has announced the arrival of the MATE 1.1 desktop. MATE, which is largely supported by the Mint project, has gained a significant share of the Linux desktop market since it first appeared in 2011. MATE is a fork of the Gnome 2 desktop and was launched when the Gnome team abandoned Gnome 2 development to focus on Gnome 3. The move was controversial at the time, with many users expressing a preference for Gnome 2, but the Gnome team chose not to divide their efforts, which led to an opening for a new project that would provide a continuation of the Gnome 2 code.

The big news for the latest version 1.1 is that MATE now supports both the GTK2 and GTK3 development environments, so users can have the best of both Gnome 2 and Gnome 3. (The developers emphasize that the GTK3 support is still experimental.)

MATE originally rocketed to public attention through its association with the popular Mint project, but since then, several other leading Linux distros have included MATE in their package repositories. MATE 1.1 has been in development for 15 months. For more information on the new release, see the announcement at the MATE project website.

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