Thanks to Martin Wimpress, the leader of the Ubuntu MATE project, we told you a few days ago that the MATE 1.14.1 desktop environment had finally landed for Ubuntu MATE 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) users, which they can install right now.

And today we bring more great news for those who love and use the Ubuntu MATE operating system on their personal computer, as Martin Wimpress informs us that, after some rigorous tests, it was discovered that the upcoming Ubuntu MATE 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) release would use less RAM.

Why and how that happened? Well, it appears that when building the MATE 1.14.1 desktop environment against the latest GTK3 technologies, the entire Ubuntu MATE 16.10 operating system will consume much less system memory than Ubuntu MATE 16.04 LTS with MATE 1.14.1 desktop built against the GTK2 libraries.

"MATE Desktop 1.14.1 does not use significantly more RAM that MATE Desktop 1.12.1, when both are built again GTK2. Ubuntu MATE 16.10 (pre-alpha) using MATE Desktop 1.14.1 built against GTK3 uses less RAM than either Ubuntu MATE 16.04 configuration using GTK2," reads the new blog post on the Ubuntu MATE website.

Here's why Ubuntu MATE 16.10 will use less RAM than Ubuntu MATE 16.04

According to the Ubuntu MATE developers, there are a few reasons the Ubuntu MATE 16.10 operating system will use less RAM than Ubuntu MATE 16.04 LTS, in addition to the fact that the MATE 1.14.1 desktop environment will be built against the latest GTK+ 3.x libraries.

First, it appears that the Tilda pop-up virtual terminal for X will no longer be executed by default when running Ubuntu MATE 16.10 (users can enable it via MATE Tweak). Then, DNS lookups are being performed by the systemd-resolved tool via the libnss-resolve library in NetworkManager, which will be a system-wide change for all Ubuntu 16.10 releases.

Another factor that will make Ubuntu MATE 16.10 (Yakkety Yak) use less RAM than Ubuntu MATE 16.04 LTS (Xenial Xerus) is that all the default applications pre-installed are using the latest GTK3 technologies, and not the GTK2 ones. To see how much RAM Ubuntu MATE 16.10 will be using, please take a look at the tests conducted by Martin Wimpress and his team.