Development status Active | ||
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Developer(s) Perberos and MATE Developers Initial release August 19, 2011; 5 years ago (2011-08-19) Stable release 1.18 / March 13, 2017; 1 day ago (2017-03-13) Preview release 1.17.2 / January 18, 2017; 55 days ago (2017-01-18) Repository git.mate-desktop.org/mate-desktop/ | ||
MATE (/ˈmɑːteɪ/; [ˈmate]) is a desktop environment forked from the now-unmaintained code base of GNOME 2. It is named after the South American plant yerba mate and tea made from the herb, mate. The name was originally all capital letters to follow the nomenclature of other Free Software desktop environments like KDE and LXDE. The recursive backronym "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!"). The use of a new name, instead of GNOME, avoids conflicts with GNOME 3 components.
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History
GNOME 3 (released in April 2011) replaced the classic desktop metaphor, substituting its native user interface: GNOME Shell. This action led to some criticism from parts of the free software community. Some users refused to accept the new interface design of GNOME and called for continued development of GNOME 2. An Argentine user of Arch Linux started the MATE project in order to meet this demand and announced the availability of MATE on 18 June 2011.
Software components
MATE has forked a number of applications originating as the GNOME Core Applications, and developers have written several other applications from scratch. The forked applications have new names. Most of them used names from Spanish, including:
Further development
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."
New features have been added to Caja such as undo/redo and diff viewing for file replacements.
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.
Adoption
MATE 1.2 was released on 16 April 2012. MATE has been one of the default desktop environments shipped with Linux Mint since version 12 "Lisa", Linux Mint Debian Edition since "201303", Sabayon Linux since release 10, a Fedora spin (since Fedora 18), and as the desktop environment in Ubuntu MATE 14.10.
MATE is also available in the official repositories of several other Linux distributions, including Ubuntu, Arch Linux, Debian, Kali Linux, Mageia, ROSA, Gentoo, openSUSE and PCLinuxOS. Aside from that, there are third party repositories for Slackware. Version 3.5 and up of GhostBSD include MATE as the default desktop environment, making it the second inclusion of MATE as a default desktop, after Linux Mint, and the first in a non-Linux OS. It is also available for FreeBSD (alongside its derivatives, such as PC-BSD) and NetBSD and is default on OpenIndiana.
Arch Linux
MATE was initially announced on the Arch Linux forum on 18 June 2011, and became official community package in January 2014.
Ubuntu MATE
In November 2014, the Ubuntu MATE team released version 14.04 LTS, which will be supported until April 2019.
In March 2015, Ubuntu MATE was granted official Ubuntu flavour status from version 15.04 onwards.