As you may know, Ubuntu Mate is the newest official *Buntu flavor and has released Ubuntu Mate 14.10, Ubuntu Mate 14.04 and Ubuntu Mate 15.04 (in this order) since it had been adopted in the Ubuntu family.
The Mate Desktop started as GNOME 2 fork back in 2011, when the Linux systems adopted GNOME 3. Today, MATE is available by default on Fedora, Arch Linux, Linux Mint and BSD (and forks of this systems).
Mate Desktop 1.10 has been recently released, bringing new features and bug-fixes.
Highlights:
- GTK3 support is still considered experimental
- Arch Linux and Fedora currently offer alternative GTK3 builds.
- Caja now has an extension manager so plugin can be enabled/disabled at run-time.
- Atril now supports ePub.
- libmatemixer, an audio mixer library for MATE desktop, has been introduced.
- Provides an abstract API allowing access to mixer functionality available in the PulseAudio, ALSA and OSS sound systems.
- Static code analysis has resulted in many memory leaks being plugged.
- Theme support has been expanded to GTK 3.8 to 3.16 including CSD and pop-over support.
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Installation instructions:
The latest versions of Mate desktop are available via the Ubuntu MATE PPAs, so installing it Ubuntu 15.04 Vivid Vervet should not be too difficult.
Just add the PPA to your system, update the local repository index and mate-desktop-environment package:
$ sudo apt-add-repository ppa:ubuntu-mate-dev/ppa
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install mate-desktop-environment
Optional, to remove Mate and reverse the system to its previous state, do:
$ sudo apt-get install ppa-purge
$ sudo ppa-purge ppa:ubuntu-mate-dev/ppa
