During this week the development of Ubuntu has been frozen and with it the launch of the final Ubuntu beta. After that, the final betas of the official flavors have been published, including Ubuntu MATE, a version that is increasingly popular among Ubuntu users and those of other distributions.
This version will bring quite a lot of news for the official flavor, including the arrival of MATE 1.18, the latest version of this popular desktop that is so reminiscent of the old versions of Gnome 2.
MATE 1.18 is not only released from the GTK2 libraries but also includes support for Wayland and for touchscreens, something increasingly common among laptops and devices such as Raspberry Pi.
Ubuntu MATE 17.04 will not have a version for PowerPC although it will have the 32-bit version
Along with MATE 1.18, the desktop brings improvements in the operation of common desktop applications, including Caja, the file manager and the operation of MenuLibre, the desktop menu manager. In this version also MATE Dock Applet is included, a great complement for dock lovers.
MATE 1.18 is not the only novelty that this version of the official Ubuntu MATE 17.04 flavor will bring. Like other distributions, Ubuntu MATE abandons the PowerPC or also called PPC architecture. A) Yes, Ubuntu MATE 17.04 will only have a 64-bit iso image and another 32-bit iso image. With this, the development team takes a piece of work off and concentrates on developing the most used and most downloaded versions.
The beta version can be obtained through this link. And although we can use it on any computer, the best thing to do is not to use it on a production team but on a virtual machine, something that will show us how the distribution will work but will not affect our data.
Ubuntu Mate I met it in its Fedora version, in fact, I never got used to Gnome 3, I find it still very messy, unlike this one, which is more elegant and orderly.