Now available the second alpha of Ubuntu MATE 17.10

The Ubuntu MATE team has made available to its users the second alpha version of Ubuntu MATE 17.10. A version that brings a lot of new features and that seems to be the heir to those Unity lovers, at least while the Unity fork remains unstable.

Ubuntu MATE 17.10 will bring a lot of news, more than the radical change of the software store, the famous Software Boutique and the latest version of the MATE desktop. In this second alpha we have been able to see changes that are focus on the new HUD, the Global menu and the applets that the desktop will have.

Surely many of you have been struck by the vertical dock that MATE has. This is due to the new customization layer that MATE Tweaks incorporates and that together with the HUD make Ubuntu MATE have an interface similar to Unity. The global menu is also incorporated by default in Ubuntu MATE, making us have the same functionality as Unity in the window management aspect. At the moment, they are only compatible with this type of menu: LibreOffice, Mozilla applications and applications created with electron technology.

Mate Tweak incorporates new features, including customization layers. These layers allow us to adapt Ubuntu MATE 17.10 to our liking. The layer that looks like Unity is called Mutiny and it will not be by default in Ubuntu 17.10, that is, we can use it but those who want the classic look, can continue using it. The Ubuntu MATE applets have also been renewed and in some cases added such as the Optimus applet for Nvidia drivers or the messages applet for notifications.

Personally I give more importance to internal changes, important changes in this version. It has been done modifications in Compiz making it consume less ram memory, existing bugs have also been fixed and Compton has been optimized for video games. This makes the next version of ubuntu MATE less resource consuming and more optimized for computers with fewer resources.

Ubuntu MATE 17.10 Alpha 2 you can get it from this link. However, we must remember that it is an alpha version, so we cannot use it in production equipment, but we can test it in a virtual machine.