MATE Desktop 1.20 released with improved stability and HiDPI support

Mr. Martin Wimpress, on behalf of MATE Desktop team, has announced the release of MATE Desktop 1.20, the latest stable release of modern desktop environment following traditional desktop metaphor. This release is a result of 9 months of continuous development since the announcement of MATE 1.18. It brings various bug fixes and enhancements over the previous release.

Global Menu in Ubuntu MATE 17.10 (File Picture)

The main focus in MATE 1.20 was stabilizing the ecosystem by replacing the deprecated code sections and rewriting some of the poorly written code snippets. It also includes an improved version of Macro - the window manager along with support for HiDPI.

The main highlights in MATE Desktop 1.20 can be summarized as follows:

HiDPI display support for dynamic resolution detection and scaling.

Improved cross-toolkit integrate with HiDPI hints for Qt applications

Dynamic resize and scale with HiDPI triggering, no log out/in required

Marco provides support for DRI3 and XPresent, if available.

Frame rates in games are significantly increased when using Marco.

Marco now supports drag to quadrant window tiling, cursor keys can be used to navigate the Alt + Tab switcher and keyboard shortcuts to move windows to another monitor were added.

Support for Global Menu providers like vala-panel-appmenu

Better status Notifier Items (SNI) support for MATE panels.

MATE Terminal now supports background images, adds Solarized themes and keybindings to switch tabs.

Atril, the document viewer, has had a massive overhaul and is better in every single way. Yes, all ways. Better!

In particular accessibility support for visually impaired users is considerably improved.

Caret navigation has been added.

The Invest applet has been dropped from MATE Applets.

The API, provided by Yahoo, has been discontinued and there is no reputable drop in replacement available.

Panel applets now size correctly based on the units being displayed and many graphs are dynamically scaled.

MATE Themes have seen significant improvements to fully implement all style classes exposed by GTK 3.22

Engrampa, the archive viewer, has improved support for encrypted 7z archives.

MATE Sensors Applet (finally) supports udisks2.

OpenBSD authentication is supported in MATE Screensaver and minizip in Atril supports more BSD variants.

Translations are updated. Thank you to our team of translators!

Also for distribution maintainers, the minimum GTK3+ and GLib requirements have been bumped.

GTK 3.22 and GLib 2.50 or newer are required to build MATE Desktop 1.20.