Dear fellow Mate mates,
I'm a bit late to the party - our new magazine "LinuxWelt" 2017-02 is already available and at news stands across Germany, Austria and Switzerland. We baked a lovely DVD with a lot of flavours of Linux. One of them is Ubuntu MATE 16.10. There's a review on the DVD and in the magazine by yours truly. A clip from the paper and a (quickly hacked together) translation from German to English is attached to this post.
Lots of thanks to the Ubuntu MATE team and to the folks over at Canonical who made all of this possible.
Translation
Ubuntu Mate 16.10
A fresh infusion of Mate – Ubuntu Mate (32 bit version on this DVD ). Its desktop environment has been rewritten and recompiled to catch up with Gnome 3.
For a while now Ubuntu Mate isn’t a just niche distribution, but a Linux system that can be recommended to beginners and switchers without the need for a tedious support job for those who recommended it.
Using Mate on the desktop, practically every user is on the sunny side of of things as they are today on a Linux desktop machine. It’s intuitive, since the concept is a continuing all the things that were already good in Gnome 2. From Gnome also derives the code which has seen a major overhaul, without breaking stuff. Ubuntu Mate 16.10 delivers a sensible software collection as well a “Software Boutique” which allows novice users to set up their system from the welcome screen with just a few mouse clicks. Cool for Krauts: The translation into German of the fabled Welcome screen has got some more attention.
All in all, Ubuntu Mate is great for the Linux freshman in principle, whereas this new version 16.10 attracts probably more the connoisseur of a non-LTS Ubuntu version. New hardware with the dreaded Skylake-CPUs form Intel? Ubuntu Mate 16.10 is up to it. And it delivers. The distribution is since almost two years an official member of the Ubuntu zoo and will keep on delivering.
Reconstruction for GTK3
With the major Mate desktop rewrite done, Ubuntu Mate 16.10 has
a lot of fresh internal wiring: Mate version 1.16 has been compiled using the GTK3 library and is therefore fit for any future developments followong the strain of Gnome 3. All the Gnome 3 applications now almost perfectly match within the Mate Desktop. Consequently all the pre-installed programs such as Firefox 49 and Libre Office 5.2.2 are there in their GTK3 version. For example, the add-on "libreoffice-gtk3" provides compatibility with the new toolkit for Libre Office. With this, Ubuntu Mate sets the mark for other distributions with the Mate desktop. Linux Mint 18 comes to mind, that still uses the old version of the Gnome toolkit in order to maintain the graphical appearance of Mint-Tools that haven’t been ported yet. The develppers of Ubuntu Mate have escalated their plan to siwtch to GTK3, The original planning was to finalize this important step only with the next version of Ubuntu mate. However, thanks to many friends and supporters of this Ubuntu flavor, the tedious work was done quicker done expected.
Verdict
Even common users not very interested in the inner workings of GTK3 versus GTK2 will enjoy a thoroughly designed Linux desktop system that can easily outclass the other members of the Ubuntu distribution circle in terms of user-friendlieness. It’s nice to see that remodeling according to GTK3 doesn't require a lot of more memory – done right, GTK3 requires a few more megabyte here and there (analyzed with tool ps_mem.py; https://github.com/pixelb/ps_mem). Installing the system on harddisk requires at least 6 GB. Our LinuxWelt DVD has this distribution as a bootable, installable live-system as well as well as an original ISO file.
Captions:
A welcomed way to setup to system: The welcome screen doesn’t just show information but also has comfortable way to install software via the "Software Boutique".
GTK3 says hello: Matching the new Mate desktop Libre Office is pre-installed using the new toolkit. A couple of more megabyte are needed to say good-bye to GTK2.
