GNOME2 Fork MATE Desktop 1.6 Released

An anonymous reader writes "Excerpts from the announcement: 'This release is a giant step forward from the 1.4 release. In this release, we have replaced many deprecated packages and libraries with new technologies available in GLib. We have also added a lot of new features (...) MATE 1.6 is the result of 8 months of intense development and contains 1800 contributions by 39 people, and more than 150 translators.' See the release notes for a list of changes and new features." They've unforked a number of old GNOME 2 libraries, relying instead of technology from GLib/Gtk+ 3 and other projects where it makes sense. None of the new features really stand out on their own, but it looks like there are dozens of small improvements that should make the desktop experience more pleasant.

Comments

Re:Pointless fork

[ichthus]

What difference does it make? I use KDE (this week), and all my GTK programs still run fine. There are no compatibility issues to worry about.

You used the word "deploy", which makes it seem like you're concerned with having many systems with identical desktop configurations. In that case, just install the one you prefer to manage. There are many to choose from, including mate ('sudo apt-get install mate').

Re:As a mate desktop user

[TheSpoom]

I think the idea with forking everything was that they could rely on the forked programs working correctly inside MATE, instead of attempting to force newer versions of those programs from Gnome 3 to work inside an older desktop environment. Also, it (theoretically) lets you run MATE and Gnome 3 on the same computer without conflicts.