Just a few minutes ago, Ubuntu MATE project leader - and now Canonical employee - Martin Wimpress informed us about the availability of the MATE 1.16 desktop environment for GNU/Linux operating systems.

It has been six long months since the MATE 1.14 desktop environment was announced, during which the MATE development team worked hard on bringing lots of improvements to the core applications included in the lightweight graphical desktop interface used by default in the Ubuntu MATE operating system and other GNU/Linux distributions, as well as lots of other enhancements and cosmetic changes.

"After 6 months of development the MATE Desktop team are proud to announce the release of MATE Desktop 1.16. We’d like to thank every MATE contributor for their help making this release possible," says Martin Wimpress. "The release is focused on improving GTK3+ compatibility, migrating components to newer libraries, fixing bugs and code hygene."

Here's what's new in MATE 1.16

The biggest and most important feature of the MATE 1.16 desktop environment is improved support for the latest GTK+ 3.22 GUI (Graphical User Interface) toolkit, which has been extended across the entire MATE desktop, bringing both application and theme support.

Among the apps that now support GTK+ 3, we can mention the Engrampa archive manager, MATE Terminal terminal emulator, MATE Notification Daemon, MATE Session Manager, and MATE PolKit. Additionally, the Engrampa, MATE Applets, MATE Netbook, and MATE User Share apps have been ported to the GApplcation widget.

Last but not least, MATE 1.16 separate the Engrampa, MATE Applets, MATE Netbook, MATE Power Manager, MATE Terminal, and Pluma applications from the libmate-desktop library. Many bugs and regressions reported by users since MATE 1.14 have been fixed as well, and lots of translations updated.

MATE 1.16 is available for download right now for package maintainers to include it in their distros. A complete changelog with all the goodies, minor improvements, updated applications, and other bugfixes can be found in the official release announcement. MATE 1.16 will soon be available in the main repositories of your favorite distribution.