MATE (desktop environment)

Desktop environment forked from GNOME 2 From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

MATE (desktop environment)

MATE (/ˈmɑːt/ MAH-tay)[4] is a desktop environment composed of free and open-source software that runs on Linux, and other Unix-like operating systems such as BSD, and illumos.[5][6]

Quick Facts Developer(s), Initial release ...
MATE
Developer(s)Clement Lefebvre, Perberos, Stefano Karapetsas, et al.[1]
Initial releaseAugust 19, 2011; 13 years ago (2011-08-19)
Stable release
1.28.2[2]  / 11 March 2024
Repository
Written inC[3]
Operating systemUnix-like, Unix
TypeDesktop environment
LicenseGPLv2+, LGPLv2+
Websitemate-desktop.org
Close

Name

MATE is named after the South American plant yerba mate and tea made from the herb, mate.[4] The name is stylized in all capital letters to follow the nomenclature of other Free Software desktop environments like KDE Plasma and LXDE. The recursive backronym "MATE Advanced Traditional Environment" was subsequently adopted by most of the MATE community, again in the spirit of Free Software like GNU ("GNU's Not Unix!").[7] The use of a new name, instead of GNOME, avoids naming conflicts with GNOME 3 components.[7]

History

Perberos, an Argentine user of Arch Linux, started the MATE project[8] to fork and continue GNOME 2 in response to the negative reception of GNOME 3, which had replaced its traditional taskbar (GNOME Panel) with GNOME Shell. MATE aims to maintain and continue the latest GNOME 2 code base, frameworks, and core applications.[9][10][11]

MATE was initially announced for Debian on November 8, 2013, at its official website.[12]

MATE became an official Arch Linux community package in January 2014.[13]

Component applications

Thumb
Showing a main component of "Caja" file-manager

MATE has forked a number of applications which originated as GNOME Core Applications, and developers have written several other applications from scratch. The forked applications have new names, most of them from Spanish.[14]

More information Application name, Spanish translation ...
Mate applications
Application name Spanish translation Forked from Description Features
Atril lectern Evince Document viewer EPUB support

Caret navigation support[15]

Caja box GNOME Files (Nautilus) File Manager Extension support[16]
Engrampa staple Archive Manager (File Roller) File archiver
Eye of MATE Eye of GNOME Image viewer
MATE Calculator GNOME Calculator Calculator
MATE Control Center GNOME Control Center MATE desktop settings
MATE System Monitor GNOME System Monitor Graphical resource monitor
MATE Terminal GNOME Terminal Terminal emulator
marco frame Metacity MATE window manager
Mozo waiter Alacarte Menu editor
Pluma pen Gedit Text editor
Close
Thumb
Screenshot of Caja file manager: v.1.26
Thumb
Caja-about, version 1.26

Development

Thumb
Screenshot of MATE 1.10, GTK3 version, on Manjaro Linux

MATE fully supports the GTK 3 application framework. The project is supported by Ubuntu MATE lead developer Martin Wimpress and by the Linux Mint development team:

We consider MATE yet another desktop, just like KDE, Gnome 3, Xfce etc... and based on the popularity of Gnome 2 in previous releases of Linux Mint, we are dedicated to support it and to help it improve. The most popular Linux desktop was, and arguably is, Gnome 2.[17]

New features have been added to Caja such as undo/redo[18] and diff viewing for file replacements.[19] MATE 1.6 removes some deprecated libraries, moving from mate-conf (a fork of GConf) to GSettings, and from mate-corba (a fork of GNOME's Bonobo) to D-Bus.

One of the aims of the MATE developers is to provide a traditional user experience while using the newest technologies. In MATE 1.20, which was released in February 2018, support for HiDPI was added and the GTK version got increased to 3.22. The MATE 1.22 release migrated many programs from Python 2 to Python 3 and from dbus-glib to GDBus. In an upcoming version, support for Wayland will be added.[20]

Release history

Thumb
Screenshot of a PC-BSD 10.1.2 desktop (MATE) with dual monitor (dual head, pivot). The running free and open-source (FOSS) programs are: GIMP, OpenShot Video Editor, file manager, Eric Python development IDE. Also shown: Minecraft 1.8.7 (with "Forge" mods).

Note that there are an odd number of versions between each official release. They are treated as versions under development, and are not announced as official releases.

More information Date, Version ...
Date Version
2011-06-18 Announced at Arch Linux forum[21]
2011-08-19 Initial release[citation needed]
2012-04-16 1.2
2012-07-30 1.4
2013-04-02 1.6
2014-03-04 1.8
2015-06-11 1.10
2015-11-05 1.12
2016-04-08 1.14
2016-09-21 1.16
2017-03-13 1.18
2018-02-07 1.20
2019-03-18 1.22
2020-02-10 1.24
2021-08-03 1.26
2024-02-12 1.28[22]
Close

Adoption

The MATE website lists 27 Linux distributions and 5 Unix-like operating systems that support the MATE desktop environment.[23]

Reception

MATE was criticized for having no Wayland support [24] but in version 1.28 Wayland support was "initially added".[25] Some users are now sticking more to the Wayland support, as Wayland has significant improvements since.

See also

References

Loading related searches...

Wikiwand - on

Seamless Wikipedia browsing. On steroids.