MATE 1.8 Released

After being developed for some months, finally this morning, i got a notification from the lead developer Stefano that he has released MATE 1.8 to public along with the blog post on MATE's official blog.

I will start building packages for Slackware 14.1, both 32/64 bit architecture and upload it to the official repository and also to it's mirror sites. For those who can't wait, you can build it from master branch as of today as it has been updated for 1.8 since few days ago.

We will make a new branch for this release soon, where bug fixes and updates for MATE 1.8 will be going to this branch and master will be used to track MATE 1.9 progress.

Here are the changes in MATE 1.8:

Caja (file manager)

• Added option to use IEC units instead of SI units
• Added “Open parent location” option in context menu in search view

Marco (window manager)

• Added side-by-side tiling (windows snapping)

Panel

• Added support to run dialog and main menu opening with metacity keybindings
• Show a progress bar in logout dialog

Control center

• Added support for Metacity as window manager

MATE Desktop library

• Added MATE User Guide
• Added mpaste tool for paste.mate-desktop.org

Eye Of MATE (image viewer)

• Added shuffle mode in slideshow

Engrampa (file archiver)

• Show always the “extract to” action in caja extension

Screensaver

• Show date and time in lock dialog

Applets

• Added undo functionality to sticky note applet
• New “command” applet to show the output of a command
• Rewritten “timer” applet in c
• Mouse middle click on volume applet toggles mute state

Dropped packages

• Replaced mate-doc-utils with yelp-tools
• Replaced libmatekeyring/mate-keyring with libsecret/gnome-keyring
• Replaced libmatewnck with libwnck
• Replaced mucharmap with gucharmap
• Replaced mate-bluetooth with blueman
• Merged all caja extensions in a single package

Other improvements

• Fixed a lot of code deprecations
• Fixed a lot of bugs
• Added and improved a lot of translations 

Enjoy MATE 1.8 and as always, feel free to give feedback to MSB project through our email: mateslackbuilds@gmail.com and also in our IRC channel: #msb on Freenode.