14 DAY TRIAL // Ubuntu MATE 17.10 was released today as part of today's Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) operating system, bringing six month's worth of improvements and new features for fans of the MATE desktop environment.
For the Ubuntu MATE 17.10 release, Martin Wimpress and his team of skillfull developers managed to add lots of interesting goodies, starting with support for Snap apps integrated into the distribution and continuing with a new panel layout called Mutiny, dedicated to fans of the Unity 7 desktop.
That's right, Ubuntu MATE 17.10 is the first to ship with a Snap app installed by default, namely pulse-mixer, a command-line tool for changing the volume of the PulseAudio sound system. As for Mutiny, it's a very nice addition to the multitude of panel layouts offered by the distribution.
Global Menu, Heads-Up Display (HUD), improved indicators
Among other changes, Ubuntu MATE 17.10 comes with support for global menus and the Heads-Up Display (HUD) feature that was available in the Unity user interface. The login screen has been changed to Slick Greeter, powered by LightDM, and you can now use the Super key to active menu launchers.
"Global Menu support is now much improved, even compared to 17.10 Alpha 2, and available via the Contemporary, Cupertino and Mutiny layouts which can be activated via MATE Tweak. Fully functional with GTK, Qt, LibreOffice, Firefox/Thunderbird, Google Chrome, Electron and others," reads today's announcement.
Support for indicators was improved as well in this release, which offers the Optimus (for Nvidia GPUs), Bluetooth, Network, Power, Messages, Sound, and Session indicators by default. In-house built tools like MATE Tweak, MATE Dock Applet, MATE Menu, and Ubuntu MATE Welcome were also updated to new versions.
MATE 1.18.0 is used as default desktop environment, and Ubuntu MATE 17.10 inherits all the goodies from the Ubuntu 17.10 (Artful Aardvark) release, including the GCC 7 and Python 3.6 stacks, the Linux 4.13 kernel, Bluetooth and USB audio improvements, as well as out-of-the-box accellerated video playback for Intel GPUs.
Ubuntu MATE 17.10 is available for download right now on our web portal for 64-bit and 32-bit computers. It's also possible to upgrade from Ubuntu MATE 17.04 (Zesty Zapus) if you follow our tutorial on how to upgrade Ubuntu 17.04 to Ubuntu 17.10. Ubuntu MATE 17.10 will be supported for nine months, until July 2018.
