After 8 months of development, MATE 1.6 has been released yesterday and its Ubuntu and Debian repositories have been updated a few hours ago with the latest MATE desktop. The new version comes with many changes such as Systemd-logind support, Caja (file manager) improvements and more.

MATE 1.6 is "a giant step forward from the 1.4 release" according to the MATE developers and with this release, many deprecated packages and libraries have been replaced with new technologies available in GLib.

For those not familiar with MATE, this is a GNOME2 fork which lets you use the old GNOME 2 desktop interface and applications but it also allows you to use new applications so for instance, you can use Nautilus 3 with it and so on. Also, MATE can be installed in parallel with GNOME 3, something that wasn't possible with the vanilla GNOME 2.