After almost three years of development, the official announcement has been made regarding the release of Mate 1.28. This new version continues the development of the code base GNOME 2.32 while maintaining the classic desktop layout. While the release announcement was dated February, it was only recently updated on the project website. Prior to this, the new branch was only mentioned in the GIT repository of the project through tags tags. Packages with Mate 1.28 are already available in the repositories of various distributions such as Fedora 40, Gentoo, Mage, Manjaro, OpenSUSE, Ubuntu, Arch Linux, Alt Linux, Artix, OpenIndiana, GhostBSD, Parabola, Solus, and Void Linux.
The most significant changes include:
- Focus on supporting Wayland protocol for a new session with an experimental session based on Wayfire’s composite server.
- Support for managing icons on the desktop, background images, and changing wallpaper in Caja file manager.
- Transition to using the Meson build system for various Mate applications.
- Addition of “Alt-Tab-raise-windows” feature in the window manager, Marco.
- Updates to Atril document viewer and implementation of Epub format support.
- Improvements in various utilities like Engrampa for archive management and Mate-Control-Center configurator.
- Enhancements to EOM image viewer for stability and efficiency.
/Reports, release notes, official announcements.