MATE 1.26 is out now with big changes like initial Wayland support

The MATE desktop environment version 1.26 has released after 18 months of development and excitingly adds some more Wayland support to various parts of the stack. MATE is the continuation of the classic GNOME 2, before the GNOME team completely changed the way the desktop works.

"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 MATE team.

One of the big additions is the bring up of Wayland support for Atril, System Monitor, Pluma, Terminal and other components of the Desktop. There's also updates to Calculator and Terminal so they can now be built with the Meson build system.

Pluma, their text editor, saw multiple improvements including: a mini-map to give you a document overview, new grid background patterns to turn Pluma into a writing pad, the Sort plugin now supports undo, a show/hide line numbers shortcut (CTRL + Y) and a redesign of the preferences UI for the new features. On top of that there's the brand new Pluma Plugins so you can turn Pluma into a "feature-rich IDE".

Caja, the file manager, gained some nifty new features like: being able to format a drive from the context menu, there's a new Bookmarks sidebar option and they integrated the Caja Actions extension to enable adding "arbitrary programs to be launched through the context menu".

Plus an assortment of updates for the Calculator, more info in the Netspeed applet, the Control Center got some UI improvements, the Atril document viewer should perform better scrolling through large documents, the Marco window manager is more reliable at restoring windows to their original position and lots of other small improvements.

Of course they also fixed bugs, solved some memory leaks and the codebase of "almost all" of the Desktop components was modernised to help future development.

If you want to get involved in development for MATE they have a new Wiki to help with that too.

See the release announcement for more.