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.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
PublicNuisance Aug 19, 2021
I wish Mate and XFCE team could join forces to adopt and support wlroots compositor in order to improve it. I think those awesome but underfunded projects would have a lot to gain from this kind of mutual collaboration.
Considering XFCE is one of the only other DE's I don't mind using I would be happy to see this.
I wish Mate and XFCE team could join forces to adopt and support wlroots compositor in order to improve it. I think those awesome but underfunded projects would have a lot to gain from this kind of mutual collaboration.
XFCE are still debating whether they will port to Wayland at all, because "We do not have the resources to maintain our own Wayland compositor"
I'm not counting on a cooperation of MATE and XFCE.
So, what's their plan for when Wayland becomes pretty much the only game in town?I wish Mate and XFCE team could join forces to adopt and support wlroots compositor in order to improve it. I think those awesome but underfunded projects would have a lot to gain from this kind of mutual collaboration.
XFCE are still debating whether they will port to Wayland at all, because "We do not have the resources to maintain our own Wayland compositor"
I'm not counting on a cooperation of MATE and XFCE.
Last edited by Purple Library Guy on 19 August 2021 at 6:55 pm UTC
XFCE are still debating whether they will port to Wayland at all, because "We do not have the resources to maintain our own Wayland compositor"I'm aware of their situation, that's why I think this decision could help both the project (not to confuse with "I think it will happen") and they both should try to implement wlroots instead of an in house compositor.
Any DE who doesn't support Wayland, sooner or latter, tends to no longer being relevant to the majority of users in the future (not counting those corner case of users who'll stay with x11 for some reason), which will be sad because those are very good desktop environments.
furaxhornyx Aug 20, 2021
[...]
Any DE who doesn't support Wayland, sooner or latter, tends to no longer being relevant to the majority of users in the future (not counting those corner case of users who'll stay with x11 for some reason), which will be sad because those are very good desktop environments.
Yep, I love cinnamon, and I think there still have no plan to switch to Wayland.
On the other hand, I am still stuck with an nVidia card, so...
Yep, I love cinnamon, and I think there still have no plan to switch to Wayland.I stopped to use Cinnamon because the lack of wayland and no sign of future support it, which is a shame because is one of my favorite DEs
On the other hand, I am still stuck with an nVidia card, so...I suspect they're stuck with Nvidia too (mint boxes), that's why they're not saying anything about wayland because it wouldn't work well with their product (and of course they'll never state this officially for obvious reasons)
I wish Mate and XFCE team could join forces to adopt and support wlroots compositor in order to improve it. I think those awesome but underfunded projects would have a lot to gain from this kind of mutual collaboration.
No thx wlroots has no nvidia support at all. New version of Mate still lacks vsync by default, come on mate team, forcing full composition pipeline is still not a good way to get rid of the tearing.
Last edited by Fredrik on 20 August 2021 at 2:18 pm UTC
No thx wlroots has no nvidia support at all.Not even nouveau? that's odd...
It supports Nouveau. The situation is actually the other way around: Nvidia doesn't support wlroots (since they don't support GBM).No thx wlroots has no nvidia support at all.Not even nouveau? that's odd...
The situation is actually the other way around: Nvidia doesn't support wlroots (since they don't support GBM).That's what I thought, it's important to make those things clear nowadays...
Or Mir since its now a wayland compositor? There seems to be some work ongoing for that:
https://snapcraft.io/mate-wayland
https://ubuntu-mate.community/t/mate-on-wayland/19803
The situation is actually the other way around: Nvidia doesn't support wlroots (since they don't support GBM).That's what I thought, it's important to make those things clear nowadays...
Well Nouveau is useless unless you got a really old nvidia card, it has like 10% of the performance of the official drivers so thats not an option.
Well Nouveau is useless unless you got a really old nvidia card, it has like 10% of the performance of the official drivers so thats not an option.The point is: None of those problems you described are the compositor's fault, developers can't make miracles without the information their need, it would take many years to reverse engineering something complex like drivers with firmware signed.
Last edited by BielFPs on 24 August 2021 at 2:19 pm UTC
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