Hello all,

So one month since the Ubuntu MATE 17.10 release, what progress has been made on Ubuntu MATE 18.04? Quite a bit as it happens.

17.10 Fixes

Well, the first requirement was to sit back, listen to the feedback, monitor the bug reports and take a few days break. We’ve rolled out a handful of bug fixes for 17.04 and 17.10 since.

18.04 Progress

Upstream MATE Desktop

Upstream MATE Desktop have released 23 point releases since Ubuntu MATE 17.10 was released. Many of the fixes were already cherry-picked in Ubuntu MATE 17.10. All 23 packages have been uploaded to Debian and synced to Ubuntu MATE 18.04.

The Solus Project released Brisk Menu 0.50 and that should land in Debian and Ubuntu MATE 18.04 tomorrow and Brisk Menu 0.50 is also available for 17.10 in my PPA.

Marco gets hardware acceleration

I’ve back-ported a new feature from Marco 1.19 that adds Present extension support.

TL;DR If your hardware/drivers support DRI3 then Marco compositing is now hardware accelerated. This dramatically improves 3D rendering performance, particularly in games, and eradicates screen tearing. Sadly the nvidia proprietary drivers only support DRI2, so the usual nvidia dance is required to resolve screen tearing there. But Intel and AMD users rejoice :sight_smile:

If your hardware doesn’t support DRI3 then Marco will fallback to the existing software compositor.

MATE HUD

The HUD now has a 250ms (default) timeout, holding Alt any longer and the HUD won’t get triggered. Assorted bugs have also been fixed.

Branding and Artwork

An additional 6 packages have been updated that come from the Ubuntu MATE camp. This includes branding, artwork, settings and MATE Tweak. You can look forward to a complete refresh of wallpapers in Ubuntu MATE 18.04, a new selection of high-quality photos have been added to compliment our revised abstract art.

MATE Tweak

Switching panel layouts using MATE Tweak was starting to become a little hit and miss. This has actually required a great deal of debugging, but I’m pleased to say that a new release of MATE Tweak was made today (which will feature in Ubuntu MATE 18.04 and Debian Buster) that sports bullet-proof layout switching

A number of reported issues have also been addressed and an interface to enable Ubuntu MATE Welcome to switch layouts has also been added.

MATE Window Applets

The Mutiny layout now integrates the mate-window-applets created by @IvCHo You can see these in action alongside an updated Mutiny layout here:

https://i.imgur.com/LxJHgeF.mp4

Noto Sans

We’ve switched to Noto Sans for users of Japanese, Chinese and Korean fonts and glyphs.

Next steps

Super charging Caja

Next we’ll be working on landing caja-eiciel and caja-seahorse in Debian and Ubuntu MATE.

caja-eiciel - An extension for Caja to edit access control lists (ACLs) and extended attributes (xattr)

- An extension for Caja to edit access control lists (ACLs) and extended attributes (xattr) caja-seahorse - An extension for Caja which allows encryption and decryption of OpenPGP files using GnuPG

These two extensions build on the work we started in Ubuntu MATE 17.10 to expand the usefulness of the file manager.

Ubuntu MATE Welcome and Software Boutique

I’ll finally be able to join @lah7 and work on the next generation of Ubuntu MATE Welcome the Software Boutique.

HiDPI

A blog post explaining how to setup/configure HiDPI in Ubuntu MATE 17.10 will be published soon. We’ve also started planning a more complete HiDPI implementation for MATE which we hope to debut in Ubuntu MATE 18.04