14 DAY TRIAL // After announcing that the Cinnamon 2.8 desktop environment will have a new visual workspace switcher applet, Clement Lefebvre, leader of the Linux Mint project, published details about some of the new features to be implemented in the next major release of the MATE desktop environment.
First of all, the MATE desktop, which is used by default in numerous popular GNU/Linux distributions, including Ubuntu MATE and Linux Mint, has received support for 2-finger and 3-finger clicks, as well as for natural scrolling, features implemented in the Mouse Preferences dialog, as you can see in the screenshot attached on the right.
Second of all, the next release of MATE will add small improvements to power management, such as the ability to display vendor and model information for devices, a feature that will be added to the Cinnamon 2.8 desktop environment as well and detailed in a separate article.
The Display Settings in MATE will also receive various improvements, among which we can mention the ability to display output names and display names, the addition of a new "Set as primary" button that lets users select a monitor as primary, and the renaming of the "Make default" button to "Apply system-wide."
Of course, in the following weeks we will publish more details about the new features to be implemented in the next major releases of the MATE and Cinnamon desktop environments, as soon as they become available.