MATE Testing Session

For the last few days, i have been testing MATE 1.8 RC on a clean VM of Slackware 14.1 and so far, the results were great. No major problems found during quick test and it's well integrated with Slackware 14.1. I would like to give big credit for Patrick Volkerding for giving big support of MSB in Slackware 14.1, so that some of the packages needed in MSB could be integrated in the main tree.

I'm still using MATE 1.6 on my laptop and i will try to upgrade to MATE 1.8 as soon as they are released. I never tested on upgrade process, but i believe the risk is so minimum. The MATE developer didn't make an aggressive or massive update to the packages, just incremental updates, which is something i like. I hate BIG CHANGES like what happened with the latest systemd release: systemd 209. It causes lots of problem for downstream (Linux Distributions) as they have to take precautions about the massive changes and make sure that it will not break their product.

I'm so lucky that Slackware isn't using systemd (at least until 14.1) and hopefully, we will never have to battle against systemd in the future.

MATE 1.6 is Close

MATE 1.6 is getting closer as some of the core modules has been bumped to 1.6.0 release on their GIT repository. The roadmap indicates that most of their TODO list for 1.6 release has been completed and the rest is a minor task to do. We should expect a MATE 1.6.0 release on April.

I have been working closely with Chess Griffin to bring MATE Desktop 1.6.0 for Slackware users in our MSB project and we are preparing to test the upcoming 1.6.0 release when it's released.

I have personally prepared two virtual machines which i installed Slackware-Current and Slackware64-Current on it. Both are updated with the latest patch and update from Pat.

So far, the basic desktop has been quite stable, with some minor problem as noted in the KNOWN ISSUE file. I really hope that MATE Desktop will bring another great experience for those who liked GNOME 2.