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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.
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Samsai Aug 20, 2021
Quoting: BielFPs
Quoting: FredrikNo 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).
BielFPs Aug 20, 2021
Quoting: SamsaiThe 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...
Redface Aug 20, 2021
So what are the problems to use the compositors from either Gnome or KDE, are they tied to closely to their DEs?
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
Fredrik Aug 24, 2021
Quoting: BielFPs
Quoting: SamsaiThe 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.
BielFPs Aug 24, 2021
Quoting: FredrikWell 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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