MATE Desktop 1.8 Updates Its Old GNOME2 Stack

After nearly one year of development, MATE 1.8 has been released as the latest version of its GNOME2-forked desktop.

The MATE Desktop 1.8 release is big and it adds window snapping / side-by-side tiling to its window manager, support for the original Metacity window manager alongside its forked Marco window manager, support for IEC units within the Caja (formerly Nautilus) file manager, a MATE User Guide has been introduced, various package replacements have been introduced, and a lot of bugs have been fixed.

More details on MATE 1.8 can be found via the release announcement at MATE-Desktop.org.

The MATE 1.8 release doesn't yet port any of the GTK2 code to GTK3 or any other ambitious changes like supporting the new GStreamer and systemd or provide the necessary work for Wayland, but all of that is apparently on the agenda for the MATE Desktop 1.10 release.