This Thursday, just one day after Hispanic Day, Canonical will launch Ubuntu 16.10, the next version of its desktop operating system that will arrive under the name Yakkety Yak. That same day the rest of the official flavors will also arrive, among which will be Ubuntu MATE 16.10, a version that few of us expected would arrive with the version MATE 1.16. But, as you can see in the previous screenshot, Ubuntu MATE will come with the new version of this classic graphical environment.
All important desktop packages and application updates are now available in the Ubuntu 16.10 repositories and as we expected the MATE version of Yakkety Yak is created in GTK3. Beyond the new version of the desktop and the small changes in the applications, the most outstanding novelty that will come to Ubuntu MATE 16.10 will be that it will arrive with the Linux 4.8 kernel.
Ubuntu MATE 16.10 will arrive on October 13
If you are using Ubuntu MATE 16.04 LTS and don't want to upgrade to a Long-Term Support version, the good news is that MATE project leader and now Canonical employee Martin Wimpress says who is working to do that MATE 1.16 is compatible with the Xenial Xerus and that he hopes to publish the packages later this week, although that version will be based mostly on GTK2.
Personally, Ubuntu MATE is one of the Ubuntu flavors that I like the most, but I usually run into a problem when shutting down the computer in which it can be several minutes without shutting down, that in the event that it shuts down completely. For that reason, I am now using Xubuntu, another official Ubuntu flavor that is also very configurable and fluent. You will likely (almost certainly) try Ubuntu MATE again when the Yakkety Yak versions are released. And you?
It may take a long time to shutdown issue due to systemd or the DBus daemon rather than Mate Desktop. I also use Ubuntu MATE and sometimes that error occurs that you say appearing in my console «Stopping dbus daemon ...» (as I say, it may be due to systemd because it is in charge of shutting down the system or the dbus daemon itself that does not stop when tells systemd).
The only thing that I like Mate more than Xubuntu is for nautilus, Thunar seems too simple to me. Otherwise I prefer Xubuntu. Right now I am with Linux Mint Cinnamon and I love it but little updated. This week when they release Xubuntu 16.10 I will try it again to see.
I do not understand the approach to saying that this version of MATE for ubuntu will arrive with an absolute integration of GTK + 3, or is it that it will not reach all distributions?