HOW TO INSTALL MATE 1.8 IN UBUNTU

MATE 1.8 was released about 3 weeks ago, bringing various refinements and new features such as support for Metacity as window manager, side-by-side window tiling and more, as well as many bug fixes - for more information, see THIS article.  

The official MATE Desktop wiki page doesn't offer Ubuntu installation instructions for the latest MATE Desktop 1.8 (their instructions are for MATE 1.6 - because MATE 1.8 uses a different Ubuntu repository -, at least at the time I'm writing this article), so here's how to install MATE 1.8 in Ubuntu.

Note that the official MATE 1.8 Ubuntu repository only supports Ubuntu 14.04 and 13.10!

MATE Desktop 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.

Install MATE Desktop 1.8 in Ubuntu

Warning: do not use the instructions below if you're using Linux Mint (it might break your installation)!

To add the MATE 1.8 repository and install MATE Desktop 1.8 in Ubuntu 14.04 Trusty Tahr or 13.10 Saucy Salamander, use the following commands:

echo "deb http://repo.mate-desktop.org/archive/1.8/ubuntu $(lsb_release -cs) main" | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mate-desktop.list
wget -qO - http://mirror1.mate-desktop.org/debian/mate-archive-keyring.gpg | sudo apt-key add -
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install mate-core mate-desktop-environment mate-notification-daemon

(MATE 1.6 and 1.8 use different Ubuntu repositories - as you can see in the repo line above, it uses ..."1.8/ubuntu" -, that's why if you follow the instructions on the MATE wiki, you'll get MATE 1.6 in Ubuntu, not the latest MATE Desktop 1.8)

Once all the packages are installed, log out and select MATE from the login screen.

For how to install MATE Desktop in other Linux distributions, see the official MATE wiki.

How to remove MATE 1.8 from Ubuntu

If you've used our instructions to install the latest MATE 1.8 in Ubuntu 14.04 or 13.10, you can completely remove MATE and all the packages installed from its repository by using the following command:

sudo apt-get remove atril atril-common caja caja-common engrampa engrampa-common eom eom-common gir1.2-mate-panel libatril libcaja-extension1 libmarco-private0 libmate-desktop-2-17 libmate-menu2 libmate-panel-applet4-1 libmatekbd-common libmatekbd4 libmateweather-common libmateweather1 marco marco-common mate-applets mate-applets-common mate-backgrounds mate-calc mate-calc-common mate-control-center mate-core mate-desktop mate-desktop-common mate-desktop-environment mate-dialogs mate-dialogs-common mate-icon-theme mate-media mate-media-common mate-media-gstreamer mate-menus mate-notification-daemon mate-panel mate-panel-common mate-polkit mate-polkit-common mate-power-manager mate-power-manager-common mate-screensaver mate-screensaver-common mate-session-manager mate-settings-daemon mate-settings-daemon-common mate-settings-daemon-gstreamer mate-system-monitor mate-terminal mate-terminal-common mate-themes mate-utils mate-utils-common pluma pluma-common

To also remove the MATE 1.8 repository, use the command below:

sudo rm /etc/apt/sources.list.d/mate-desktop.list