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 and LXDE. The recursivebackronym "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]
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.[13]
Screenshot of Caja file manager: v.1.26Caja-about, version 1.26
Development
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.[16]
New features have been added to Caja such as undo/redo[17] and diff viewing for file replacements.[18] 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.[19]
Release history
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.
This section needs expansion. You can help by adding to it. (May 2022)
MATE was criticized for having no Wayland support [23] but in version 1.28 Wayland support was "initially added".[24] Some users are now sticking more to the Wayland support, as Wayland has significant improvements since.
^Laishram, Ricky (August 4, 2011), Linus Torvalds Ditches GNOME For Xfce, Digitizor, archived from the original on April 11, 2015, retrieved May 28, 2021, While you are at it, could you also fork gnome, and support a gnome-2 environment? – Linus Torvalds.
^Karapetsas, Stefano (November 8, 2013). "Debian MATE Packaging Team". MATE. Archived from the original on September 17, 2021. Retrieved September 17, 2021.
^"MATEwiki". mate-desktop.org. Archived from the original on September 19, 2021. Retrieved September 24, 2021.
^Wimpress, Martin (February 7, 2018). "MATE 1.20 released". MATE. Archived from the original on September 23, 2021. Retrieved September 25, 2021.
^"MATE 1.26 released". August 10, 2021. Archived from the original on September 21, 2021. Retrieved October 1, 2021.
^Karapetsas, Stefano (January 3, 2012), "Undo/Redo in Caja", Stefano Karapetsas's Blog, archived from the original on April 16, 2014, retrieved April 15, 2014
^Karapetsas, Stefano (June 17, 2012), "What's new in next Caja", Stefano Karapetsas's Blog, archived from the original on April 16, 2014, retrieved April 15, 2014
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