There are too many change to count in this latest version

Feb 27, 2015 08:10 GMT  ·  By

The Ubuntu MATE devs have announced that their latest 15.04 Beta 1 iteration of the operating systems is now ready for download and testing. What's even better is the fact that Ubuntu MATE is now an official flavor of the Ubuntu family.

We can be thankful to the Ubuntu MATE team for not going with Mubuntu as their name. They are not the the first ones to choose a different patch than the rest. There is also Ubuntu Gnome and that would have made even less sense. What's interesting is that even if they are just now joining the other distros, this is not the first release in the 15.04 branch.

As we mentioned in a previous article, Ubuntu MATE was headed for official flavor fame and now we also have the confirmation.

Ubuntu MATE has gathered quite a following and the numbers of users for this distribution has been growing steadily. It's likely that even more people will flock towards this new flavor, especially the ones who are still regretting the old GNOME 2.

Ubuntu MATE 15.04 Beta 1 is a massive update

We're used to see important changes made from one release to another and the Ubuntu MATE developers didn't disappoint. So many improvements and changes have been made that it's even difficult to list them all.

"Yes, we finally made it! Ubuntu MATE 15.04 Beta1 is now available for official download. This official release builds on Ubuntu MATE Alpha2, introduces some new features and is officially official. Well, the big change is largely backend stuff as Ubuntu MATE has transitioned from our unofficial iso build servers to the official Canonical build infrastructure. From Ubuntu MATE 15.04 onward images are now built alongside the other members of the Ubuntu family," wrote Martin Wimpress, one of the developers of the distro.

Some of the biggest improvements in this Beta release include official support for old PowerPC Macs, some new options to change the interface on the fly with MATE Tweak, the Plank dock has been added (not by default), the LightDM GTK Greeter has been upgraded to version 2.0.0, the Yuyo GTK theme made by Sam Hewitt has been updated, and MATE Compatibility integration has been merged into upstream Compiz.

You can download Ubuntu MATE 15.04 Beta 1 right now from Softpedia and give it a spin. The Live CD works great and it's a good way to test it.

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Ubuntu MATE 15.04 Beta 1 (11 Images)

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