MATE 1.20 Released

It's a little bit behind the original schedule, but MATE 1.20 is now released for public. It's been a great development cycle and it seems their efforts came to fruit even with last minute commits on adding HiDPI support.

Here's the highlight for MATE 1.20:

• MATE Desktop 1.20 supports HiDPI displays with dynamic detection and scaling.
  • HiDPI hints for Qt applications are also pushed to the environment to improve cross toolkit integration.
  • Toggling HiDPI modes triggers dynamic resize and scale, no log out/in required.
• Marco now supports 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 shourtcuts to move windows to another monitor were added.
• Support for Global Menu providers such as vala-panel-appmenu has been added.
• MATE Panel has much improved Status Notifier Items (SNI) support.
• Bookmarks now support GTK3+ locations.
• MATE Terminal now supports background images, adds solarised themes and keybindings to switch tabs.
• Atril, the document viewer, has had a massive overhaul and is better in every single way.
  • 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.
• A-n-d for distro maintainers we’ve bumped the minimum GTK3+ and GLib requirements.
  • GTK 3.22 and GLib 2.50 or newer are required to build MATE Desktop 1.20.

If you look at the last entry, you will notice that it would be impossible to build MATE 1.20 on top of Slackware 14.2 since it's using older version of GTK+3 and GLIB libraries. Therefore, i only provide binary packages for x86_64 architecture. These packages will then be used by Eric Hameleers to create a Slackware Live ISO which is using MATE instead of KDE or any other DE. It can be used as a testing environment or demo showcase. If you need 32 bit packages, i would suggest to clone the project SlackBuild in GitHub and use it to build your own package. You can use the mate-build-{deps,base,extra}.sh script to automatically build them and install them according to the correct build order. You can grab the sources here.