MATE 1.12.1 for Ubuntu 15.10 and 16.04 LTS now available

If you are a user who does not like Unity, either because of its low performance (compared to other environments) or because of its image, you have a lot of environments to choose from. I have to confess that every time I like Unity more, and more that I will like it when Unity8 arrives, but I am also a great fan de MATE, whose image has focused on rescuing the interface that Ubuntu used until 2011.

MATE includes many GNOME applications and the developers have taken care of porting others to work well in this graphical environment. There is an entire operating system that has focused on recovering the classic image of Canonical's operating system called Ubuntu MATE, but the graphical environment can also be installed on other operating systems, as is the case with standard Ubuntu 15.10 or 16.04 LTS. The latest version of this environment is 1.12.1, and includes important news such as those detailed below.

What's New in MATE 1.12.1

• GTK3 fixes and improvements throughout MATE Desktop, including support for GTK 3.18.
• Touchpad support has been greatly improved and now includes multi-touch support and natural scrolling.
• Support for multiple monitors has been improved, so the display settings use output names and the revised UI allows us to configure the main monitor.
• El applet Power now displays manufacturer and model information, so we can differentiate between batteries for various devices.
• Improved login that now includes screen saver inhibition when playing files.
• Support for systemd extended.
• Long-term bugs have been fixed, such as the dashboard applets It is no longer reordered when changing screen resolution.
• Translations have been updated.

Applications included in MATE

• Case: the official folder manager (fork of Nautilus).
• Feather: text editor that supports most of the editing functions (fork of Gedit).
• Eye of MATE: also known as eom, it is a simple graphics viewer for MATE desktop that uses the gdk-pixbuf library (fork of Eye of GNOME)
• Lectern: a multi-page document viewer (fork of Evince).
• Staple: file manager for MATE environment (fork of File Roller).
• MAT Terminal.
• Marco: window manager.
• Waiter: the menu item editor.

How to install MATE 1.12.1

To install MATE in the latest versions of Ubuntu, we just have to open a Bus Terminal and let's write the following commands:

On Ubuntu 15.10 (Wily Werwolf)

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-mate-dev/wily-mate
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install mate-core mate-desktop-environment mate-desktop-environment-extras mate-dock-applet

On Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus)

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-mate-dev/xenial-mate
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install mate-core mate-desktop-environment mate-desktop-environment-extras mate-dock-applet

On Ubuntu 14.04.x ​​LTS (Trusty Tahr)

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ubuntu-mate-dev/ppa
sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ubuntu-mate-dev/trusty-mate
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install --no-install-recommends ubuntu-mate-core ubuntu-mate-desktop

How to select the MATE environment

When we want to enter a new graphical environment, we just have to log out and let's start a new one by choosing the new environment graphic. We will do it by clicking on the circle that appears at the top right of the login and selecting the environment we want. This is something that I have been doing for a long time, especially on my more discreet computer where Unity runs very slowly, but I needed to have it installed to do some tests.

Have you already installed MATE 1.12.1? How about?