MATE 1.4 desktop improves Caja file manager

The MATE development team has released version 1.4 of its desktop environment, adding support for sharing files via Bluetooth and further improving the Caja file manager. This update to the fork of the older 2.x branch of GNOME now allows users to open bookmarks in the Caja side pane using the enter and space keys, and, in the file conflict dialogue, a button to show the differences between files has been added; the toggle button for the text-based location bar has been restored.

MATE 1.4 includes the mate-character-map unicode character map, and features a new icon theme (mate-icon-theme-faenza) that uses uses the "Faenza" and "Faience" GNOME icon themes as well as customised icons for MATE. When compositing is enabled in the Marco window manager, an option to use fast alt-tabbing has been added and the mate-screensaver now includes support for GDM (GNOME Display Manager) user switching.

Other changes include the addition of new themes to the mate-notification-daemon, the removal of the indicator-applet-session – an applet that was used to display information from various applications in the panel – and fixes for "numerous" bugs. The developers also note that the mate-keyring and libmatekeyring backends have been updated and "now integrate properly".

According to the project's roadmap, version 1.6 of MATE may add a video player based on Totem and is expected to bring further updates to Caja, such as improvements to trash management for removable devices. Options to only show notifications on one screen and support for GTK3 in most themes are among the other planned changes.

More details, including a list of changes, can be found in the official release announcement. Download information and installation instructions for various Linux distributions including Ubuntu, Linux Mint and Fedora are provided on the MATE desktop wiki. Source code for MATE is hosted on GitHub.

(crve)